Why the *$&@ Did Dan Rather and Donald Rumsfeld Buy a New Mexico Ranch Together in 1981?
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Okay, you guys. I stumbled across something really weird today.
Donald Rumsfeld — twice Secretary of Defense, architect of the Iraq War, one of the most powerful men in the far-right American national security apparatus for five decades — co-owned from 1981 to 2007 a 9,150-acre ranch in New Mexico with Dan Rather, the broadcast journalist who anchored CBS Evening News for 24 years and was, for most of that time, the most watched news anchor in America.
Tecolote was sold in 2007 to Texas developers William Hinckley and David Gibbs of Lookout Partners L.P., who describe Rumsfeld and Rather simply as “the previous owners” who were “in partnership.”
When Rumsfeld and Rather bought the ranch in 1981, the Reagan presidency had just started. Rumsfeld was about to become a member of President Reagan’s General Advisory Committee on Arms Control, and Reagan’s Special Presidential Envoy on the Law of the Sea Treaty and to the Middle East. Rather had just replaced Walter Cronkite as Anchor of the CBS Evening News. Journalism ethics dictate that these men should not have socialized, much less secretly purchased a ranch together.
But according to the San Miguel County Assessor’s office records, they indeed bought a ranch together, as “Tecolote Partnership.”
And they bought it from a man named Carl Ingwer.
A bit of digging on Ingwer turned up, first, an archival home-tour piece from the Tucson Citizen featuring the Ingwer family home circa 1960. It’s filled with unusual, expensive-looking Asian art and antiques — the collection, Ingwer told the paper, of a family that traveled extensively through the Far East, the Middle East, India, and Australia. For a man who had sold his Cleveland business just two years earlier, the mansion in the exclusive Indian Hills Estates neighborhood — complete with swimming pool, stables for seven horses, a three-car garage, and a converted PBY Navy amphibious bomber on the property — represents a level of wealth that is difficult to explain through ordinary business success alone.
More digging showed me that Carl Henry Ingwer Jr. was born into one of northern Ohio’s most prominent industrial dynasties. His father, Carl H. Ingwer Sr., founded Ridge Tool Company in Elyria, Ohio in 1923 — a pipe wrench and pipe tool manufacturer that grew into one of the largest of its kind in the country, eventually acquired by Emerson Electric and sold under the RIDGID brand to this day. The family lived in a nearly 5,000 square foot mansion at 202 Ohio Street in Elyria, catalogued by the Lorain County Historical Society, and wintered in Palm Beach, Florida — the same small, extraordinarily exclusive island community where Jeffrey Epstein would later maintain his primary residence and where Donald Trump owns Mar-a-Lago. In the tight world of Ohio industrial money, Elyria sits just 120 miles — two hours up I-71 — from Columbus, where the Wexner family ran their retail business and where, decades later, Epstein would relocate the CIA’s Iran-Contra airline to serve Wexner’s retail empire. Carl Jr.’s mom shows up in Ohio newspaper archives, a lot, as a golf champion.
Carl Jr. was drafted in 1941 and transferred to the Army Air Corps in 1942, qualifying as a B-29 airplane commander before separating from service in late 1945. After the war he ran his family’s Cleveland business interests before selling them in 1958 and moving to Tucson, where by 1962 he had acquired Mercury Aviation Corporation — the Arizona operation of Mercury Air Group, a major aviation services company founded in 1956 by three members of the legendary Flying Tigers and a U.S. Government contractor for over 60 years.
The Flying Tigers connection is important. After World War II, Flying Tigers veterans became the backbone of the CIA’s proprietary airline network. The most famous was Civil Air Transport — later Air America — founded by AVG veterans Claire Chennault and Whiting Willauer, which became the CIA’s primary covert air transport operation through Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and beyond. Mercury Air Group, founded by three actual Flying Tigers — Robert “Catfish” Raine, Robert “Duke” Hedman, and Thomas Haywood — built its own government service network, including a significant Arizona presence with specialized logistics and technical services. Ingwer ran that Arizona operation, in Phoenix and Tucson, at the exact same moment the CIA’s documented front company Intermountain Aviation was operating in those same cities. As one historian has noted: “This is Arizona at the heart of the Cold War.”
Ingwer retired from Mercury Aviation in 1967 to focus on his ranching interests — which included the 9,150 acres in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico that he would sell fourteen years later to the Rumsfeld-Rather partnership.
This is the man the Tecolote Partnership of Dan Rather and Donald Rumsfeld bought their ranch from in 1981, a stone’s throw from both Los Alamos National Laboratories and Sandia National Laboratories, around the same time Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Mossad intelligence asset Robert Maxwell, was selling Sandia Labs a version of PROMIS software that had been bugged by Israel.
A 2001 Chicago Magazine profile of Rumsfeld revealed that the Rumsfeld-Rather friendship had a specific, documented origin. During Rumsfeld’s time in the Nixon White House, he was allegedly feeding information — exclusive scoops — directly to Rather, who was then CBS News’s White House correspondent. The arrangement was significant enough that NBC anchor Tom Brokaw recalled, decades later, how difficult it was to compete when Rumsfeld was giving his rival Rather the inside track.
The friendship between these men had a transaction at its center from the start. Rumsfeld provided career-making exclusives. Rather provided favorable access and coverage at the most-watched news network in America. The ranch came later.
The same Chicago Magazine profile listed Rather alongside Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, Sally Quinn, and Hubert Humphrey among Rumsfeld’s friends with “liberal credentials.” The implication, carefully cultivated over decades, was that Rumsfeld was a rare Republican who crossed the aisle.
The more accurate reading is that Rumsfeld understood, earlier than most, that controlling the information environment required owning the people who ran it — regardless of their party registration, and Rather likely understood the assignment, and its many rewards.
In 1974, someone inside the CIA wrote a memo to the Director of Central Intelligence with the subject line: “The Dan Rather Tapes Story.”
That memo — declassified and available in the CIA’s FOIA reading room — analyzes Rather’s specific CBS broadcasts, traces the possible origins of his sources, and notes that the DCI had apparently spoken directly with Rather before the stories aired. The memo reads not like surveillance of a journalist, but like an internal review of a managed relationship. The question the memo writer is trying to answer isn’t “what is this journalist doing?” It’s “what did our guy broadcast, and where did it come from?”
A genuine adversarial journalist does not receive pre-broadcast calls from the Director of Central Intelligence.
There is also a second CIA document in the FOIA reading room: a September 1975 file simply titled “Dan Rather and Les Midgley” — Midgley being a senior CBS News producer. Its contents remain partially redacted. The existence of a CIA file on a specific anchor and his producer is not a neutral fact.
A landmark 1977 Rolling Stone investigation by Carl Berstein documented that CBS was 'unquestionably the CIA's most valuable broadcasting asset' — with CIA access to CBS newsfilm, a private phone line connecting CBS's Washington bureau to the Agency, and annual dinners between CIA officials and CBS correspondents. Rather spent his entire career inside that institutional relationship.
The same year, CIA Director William Colby admitted under oath to Congress that the agency had cultivated relationships with hundreds of American journalists and media helpers, confirming that at least fifty U.S. reporters had official, secret relationships with the CIA. CIA Director George H.W. Bush subsequently issued a 1976 directive ending certain asset uses — a reform that was, by multiple accounts, incompletely implemented.
In 1980, Rather famously infiltrated Afghanistan dressed in Mujahideen clothing to report on the Soviet invasion. The reporting earned him the nickname “Gunga Dan” and accelerated his promotion to the CBS Evening News anchor chair, replacing Walter Cronkite the following year.
It also, as was later documented, directly influenced Congressman Charlie Wilson to champion the CIA’s covert arming of the Mujahideen — which became the largest covert operation in CIA history, and which ultimately gave rise to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
Whether Rather knew the full downstream consequences doesn’t change what his reporting functionally was: a public advocacy campaign for a covert CIA operation, dressed in the language of brave independent journalism. “Gunga Dan” wasn’t a criticism of his courage. It was a description of his role.
Here is where the Rumsfeld-Rather story intersects with Epstein directly — and where the argument that this is all coincidence becomes impossible to sustain.
Iran-Contra was ostensibly a Reagan-era scandal: the administration secretly sold arms to Iran and used the profits to illegally fund Nicaraguan Contra rebels. Several dozen officials were indicted. Eleven convictions resulted. Every single person convicted was subsequently pardoned by George H.W. Bush in the final days of his presidency.
The network that did this never dismantled. It just went private.
Rumsfeld’s connection to Iran-Contra runs through two channels. First, in December 1983, he traveled to Baghdad as Reagan’s special envoy, meeting personally with Saddam Hussein at the exact moment the US was secretly arming both sides of the Iran-Iraq war — the same arms dealing that generated the slush fund for Iran-Contra. Second, and more importantly, both Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were central figures in the Reagan-era Continuity of Government program — a shadow government infrastructure that, according to journalist Alfonso Chardy’s contemporaneous reporting, empowered Oliver North to run Iran-Contra outside congressional oversight and also developed contingency plans to suspend the Constitution itself.
Rather’s Iran-Contra connection is more layered, and more revealing. In January 1988, Rather interviewed Vice President George H.W. Bush live on air about his Iran-Contra role. The interview became famous as a confrontation — evidence, his supporters said, of Rather’s adversarial journalism. What was less reported at the time: Bush’s media consultant Roger Ailes had planted a mole inside CBS News who alerted him before the interview that Rather intended to “take Bush out of the race.” Ailes fed Bush his famous deflection line during the cab ride to the studio. Perhaps that mole was Rather himself.
Roger Ailes. Think about this, folks. Ailes was man who would later build Fox News into the most influential right-wing propaganda operation in American history had an intelligence asset inside CBS News in 1988, reporting on Dan Rather’s interview strategy to the Republican vice presidential candidate.
And Rather’s actual Iran-Contra coverage? High-profile. Confrontational in appearance. But, as one media critic noted at the time, it was ultimately focused on Reagan’s personal knowledge rather than following the deeper structural story — specifically, George H.W. Bush’s role and the use of congressional funds to finance operations the law explicitly prohibited.
A managed asset’s news coverage, in other words, looks exactly like that: loud enough to seem adversarial, narrow enough to protect what matters.
Now here is the part that should make your hands get cold.
The Iran-Contra network didn’t end with the pardons. Jeffrey Epstein was one of the mechanisms through which it continued.
Investigators in both the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office and Ohio’s Office of Inspector General identified Epstein as having a pivotal role in relocating Southern Air Transport — the CIA-owned airline that was the logistical backbone of Iran-Contra arms smuggling — from Miami to Columbus, Ohio. There, the planes were repurposed to deliver clothing for Leslie Wexner’s retail empire, including Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch. Southern Air Transport declared bankruptcy on October 1, 1998 — exactly one week before the CIA Inspector General released its official findings linking the airline to Contra cocaine trafficking. Under pressure from the governor’s office, Ohio investigators dropped their inquiry. Epstein’s role never became public, at the time.
Epstein’s earliest post-Bear Stearns work included a partnership with J. Stanley Pottinger — a former Justice Department official investigated for his role in dealing arms to Iran. They began working together when Pottinger was involved in a plot to ship US-made weapons to Iran with arms dealer Cyrus Hashemi. According to former Epstein associate Steven Hoffenberg, by 1983 Epstein was directly involved in the sale of Chinese weapons to Iran through state-owned company Norinco, at the height of the Iran-Iraq war.
The bridge between Epstein and the operational core of Iran-Contra was Adnan Khashoggi — the Saudi arms dealer and money launderer who was one of the key middlemen in the original arms-for-hostages deal. Khashoggi was a mutual associate of Epstein and his early mentor Douglas Leese, a British defense contractor with extensive intelligence connections.
In September 2004, Rather broadcast a story on 60 Minutes Wednesday about George W. Bush’s failure to fulfill his Texas Air National Guard obligations. The underlying story was true — confirmed by multiple independent sources. But Rather’s team pursued it using documents that could not be authenticated, obtained through a source chain that led nowhere, culminating in originals allegedly burned at a Kinko’s by a person no one could identify or locate.
The result: a true story was permanently discredited. Rather was out of CBS by 2006. He said it plainly: “Corporate had a lot of money at stake in getting additional stations. They didn’t want to irritate the people in power. That’s what ended my career at CBS News.”
Rumsfeld was fired by Bush in November 2006, the day after the midterm elections — a removal planned in advance, executed the moment political cover allowed it.
A year later, they sell their partnership ranch to a real estate development company from Texas. Almost like they no longer had any need for it. Almost like their twin departures were… planned.
Two men who had operated at the absolute center of American power for decades — one as the mastermind of the national security state, one as the face of the free press — were removed within a year of each other, by the same political apparatus, through different mechanisms that led to the same place: the San Miguel County Assessor’s office, where their ranch changed hands.
The independent panel that investigated Rather’s Guard story was led by Dick Thornburgh — a veteran of the Nixon and George H.W. Bush administrations. The same Nixon White House in which Rumsfeld had fed scoops to Rather. The same George H.W. Bush whose CIA directorship produced the directive on journalist assets, who had been shielded by Rather’s Iran-Contra coverage, and whose son’s Guard dereliction was buried under contaminated documents.
The circularity of this network is not subtle once you start looking. It is, in fact, the point.
I want to be precise about what I’m saying and what I’m not.
I cannot prove Dan Rather was a formally recruited, paid CIA asset. What I can show is this: CBS News, for which he was the nightly news anchor, was named by Carl Bernstein in a documented investigation of CIA media infiltration; a 1974 CIA memo suggests a managed relationship between CBS News and the DCI; a second CIA file on Rather and his producer exists in the FOIA reading room; his most celebrated reporting served CIA operational interests in Afghanistan; his Iran-Contra coverage protected George H.W. Bush while appearing adversarial; Roger Ailes ran an intelligence asset inside CBS to monitor Rather’s interview strategy; Rather’s relationship with Rumsfeld began as a transactional information exchange in the Nixon White House; and he co-owned nearly ten thousand acres of New Mexico land with one of the most powerful figures in the American national security apparatus for decades even though journalism ethics demanded he and all other reporters never take so much as a coffee from a source.
The larger argument doesn’t even require proving Rather was a CIA asset. It only requires looking clearly at what the ranch tells us.
I find it hard to believe Rumsfeld and Rather were political opposites who happened to find common ground over elk-hunting in 1981. I find it easier to believe they were two nodes in the same intelligence network — a network that has never been organized around left or right, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative. It has always been organized around power, money, and dominance: who has it, who serves it, and who gets removed when they stop being useful to it.
That network is what protected Jeffrey Epstein for decades. It is what allowed Zorro Ranch to operate as it did, in the mountains of New Mexico, while governors and attorneys general and federal investigators of both parties looked the other way. It’s what led Trump allies, Donald and Mary Catherine Huffines, to buy Zorro Ranch, where, as we speak, they have masked private police, all in black and armed with assault rifles, patrolling the property.
This is not a Democrat problem. It is not a Republican problem. It is a power problem — the problem of what happens when almost all power and money accumulates in just a few private hands. The result is that that for decades our American democracy has been little but a public performance. And now, it seems, even the performance of democracy has become optional.
Bari Weiss didn’t compromise CBS News. The compromise was structural, and it was built decades before she arrived. The only difference is that now these same forces have so completely captured everything that might have ever stopped them, that they no longer need to act like they care about us at all.
I stumbled across this story as I was investigating another one, about a different ranch owner, whose property shared a long fence line with Epstein’s, and about whom nothing has yet been written in conjunction with the Zorro Ranch stuff. Turns out, he knew Carl Ingwer. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
More on that, soon.
This story has not been reported anywhere else. Ever. If this kind of news analysis and reporting matters to you, please consider becoming a subscriber, paid if possible, and/or sharing my work. You may also leave a one-time or recurring tip in any amount. Thank you!
Alisa Valdes is an independent investigative journalist, news analyst, and the author of 15 books, including the New York Times bestseller The Dirty Girls Social Club. She spent 13 years as a staff journalist at the Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times, and hosted a documentary at WHDH-TV that won an Emmy Award for public service journalism. She publishes ALISA WRITES on Substack, where she has been digging into Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, New Mexico’s refusal to hold him or anyone in his orbit accounable, and his network of political, financial, and intelligence connections in our state. This piece is part of that ongoing series.
I say let’s ask Dan himself about this. He’s on Substack, and if he has any integrity at all, he will address this honestly. I’m sending to him now.
Wow! Again, remarkable reporting.
This part just knocked me out:
"This is not a Democrat problem. It is not a Republican problem. It is a power problem — the problem of what happens when almost all power and money accumulates in just a few private hands. The result is that that for decades our American democracy has been little but a public performance. And now, it seems, even the performance of democracy has become optional."