MENA2
By David P Beiter
Subject: MENA - (SECRET) HEARTBEAT OF AMERICA
From: jai@mantra.com (Dr. Jai Maharaj)
Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 08:05:28 GMT
Message-ID:
Organization: Mantra Corporation
Keywords: MENA politics news Jai Maharaj
Newsgroups: soc.culture.usa,misc.headlines,alt.fan.jai-maharaj,
alt.conspiracy,hawaii.nortle
Forwarded article; may not contain poster's opinions.
> From Larry-Jennie
The Washington Weekly
May 12, 1997
THE (SECRET) HEARTBEAT OF AMERICA
A New Look at the Mena Story
By Daniel Hopsicker
Everybody wants to be wanted, even television producers. So
even though the little production company of which I am a
part already has a business magazine television show up and
modestly successful (Global Business 2000; don't tell us you
haven't seen it) we wanted more. We had seen with our own
eyes, for example, the sickening spectacle of what passes for
entertainment these days: Tammy Faye Bakker at NATPE
(television production convention) last year, peddling some
talk show in syndication. And with one of the major studios
distributing, yet!
We asked ourselves: have they no shame? In today's America
that is what is known as a rhetorical question. What is this
woman famous for? And the answer (Her husband embezzled
hundreds of millions from little old ladies who couldn't
afford it) was so depressing, we decided one day to offer up
something of our own to add to America's no-longer-all-that-
rich cultural stew.
Then one night while eating Mexican down on Melrose we came
up with it: "conspiracy: the secret history." Remember "In
Search Of" with Leonard Nimoy? Back in those more innocent
times, nobody was running around in camouflage uniforms
talking wildly about The New World Order. We wanted to do an
"In Search of" for the paranoid '90s.
This is the story of the filming of the lead segment on that
show.
Mena, Arkansas. If you haven't heard of it, don't worry: either
you will, in which case the whole sordid mess has finally found
the audience it so richly deserves, or you won't, in which case
you were probably better off not knowing anyway. Because after
months of research, the one thing we can say with certainty about
US Government drug policy is, "If you have to ask, you're not
allowed to know."
The Mena story reeks of government hypocrisy on the subject of
drugs. It's the place mentioned when talk of Oliver North's
contra-guns-and-cocaine operation comes up (not often, in polite
conversation, and we still wonder, wazzup wit that?) It's where
drug smuggler Barry Seal based planes that flew guns down to
Central America, then drugs back, then guns down again, etc.,
with impunity, literally right under the noses of local law
enforcement. If there is, in Bill Moyers' legendary phrase, a
"Secret Government," a government that runs the other, more
official one, Mena is a good place to look for it.
For Mena is what the 'Clintongate' scandals are all about,
really; the commodities money was and is small potatoes, the
Whitewater real estate deal simply par for the course in American
political life. But around Mena swirls the smoke of real scandal:
allegations of massive drug-smuggling with government complicity,
whiffs of Oliver North's illegal, unconstitutional and national
soul-corroding Iran/contra/cocaine connection. And all flavored
with spicy rumors of secret Swiss bank accounts, hastening murder
by death.
That's what makes Mena so important. If there's to be a real
Watergate-type Sam Ervin at-the-gavel scandal in the next four
years, Mena is where it will be focused. So Mena is where we
headed.
* * * * * * * * * *
The market in opium, heroin, cocaine and marijuana in the
United States of America generates a gross volume of business
in excess of US $130 billion a year, making the importation,
sale and distribution of drugs an enterprise that generates
more revenue than any of the largest multinational
corporations in the world. It makes the gross volume of
illegal drugs in the United States greater than the gross
national product of all but a dozen nations in the world.
It takes longer to get to Mena than it should; the map shows none
of the slow winding curves that crawl back and forth through
mountainous western Arkansas. From Little Rock to Hot Springs is
a snap, then, just as you begin planning on lunch near the fabled
Intermountain Regional Airport located in Mena, the road west
recedes in front of you in torturous twists and turns, and before
you're there it's late afternoon, and deep shadows are turning
the landscape into a black and white picture with some sepia
tinges where the setting sun hits the tops of bare white trees.
It's pretty, almost picture-perfect country; the question is:
does it hide a secret that could bring down a government?
Because it's here, in this town nestled below the dark emerald
ridgeline of the Ouchita range, that the netherworld of crime
intersects with that of our nation's secret intelligence
operations in a way that is perhaps more visible, if still
indistinct, than at any time since the Kennedy 'hits' of the
60's.
Once in Mena itself, you're rewarded, first, with a feeling of
being as far away from the rest of the world as, say, Nepal.
There's an almost eerie sense of being outside of the ordinary
scope of everyday existence, a feeling that must have been felt
by the renegades, bandits, moonshiners and civil war irregulars
who have called these densely forested hillsides home. When we
pull our dusty crew van piled to the top with video gear into the
asphalt parking lot outside the Sun Country Motel (the biggest of
three in town) its empty of cars. And there's not much traffic on
the main drag either.
We're a typical electronic news-gathering crew: a writer/producer
(me), a cameraman who'd really rather be a cinematographer, and a
sound engineer, who's already missing his girlfriend back in San
Jose. And, as I check us in at the front desk (the gracious small
town desk clerk showing no surprise at all at one more film crew
pulling in) fatigue from the long travel day makes me wonder
about our seemingly quixotic quest, our perhaps deluded, because
self-funded, effort to shoot a pilot for a television show. (True
story: the first producer I ever worked for in Hollywood had said
to me, "Kid, anything worth making is worth making with other
peoples' money." ) But we were passionate about this project, as
all creative people have to be, or pretend to be, and besides, as
one waggish agent put it, we were shooting "The X-Files, for
real."
And so we've driven this icy road to see for ourselves this
place, without which Bill Clinton might be able to serve out his
second term in peace. And also to meet The Man.
That's because you can't talk about "Mena" without mentioning
Russell Welch, the legendary big-boned lawman who has been
compared favorably with John Wayne in more than one retelling of
this tale. Assigned to investigate drug smuggler Barry Seal in
1982, an assignment he never wanted and for which he felt himself
outgunned, Welch had single-handedly fought the Dark Side forces
(so well-hidden he was never even sure who they really were) to a
standstill. He may not have stopped drug-smuggling through this
airport, that may have been built expressly for "Special Ops,"
but he sure slowed it down a tad. Or...did he?
That's one of the questions we've come to ask him. His voice on
the phone is gruff but friendly. He'll be over to meet us at our
motel in an hour. And so I rustle through my notes for the fifth
time, trying to be as prepared as possible with the acknowledged
facts, and knowing, at the same time, that except for the few
Mena scholars out there, full knowledge of the case in all its
frequently political perambulations is well nigh impossible.
The facts of the Mena story, already much reported in venues from
CBS to the Wall Street Journal, have somehow failed to catch the
nation's attention. The reason, some analysts feel, is that the
playing field on which the Mena story takes place has been
incredibly muddied by political operatives of both the left and
right, attempting to use the case for partisan advantage. Welch
and the other players and eye-witnesses are chary, wary, and, in
some cases, downright scared for their lives when microphones
begin poking in their faces. And not, according to the story
we're about to hear, without good cause.
So we're not holding out much hope of prying any new revelations
from Mr. Welch. We just want to ask him some simple questions:
"If drugs are the biggest industry in the world today, who's the
industry's General Motors? And, who did he think had the bigger
airline distribution system: Federal Express or Cocaine
Unlimited?
We've decided not to go for the minutiae connected with Welch's
years-long thwarted probe into government complicity in drug-
smuggling. Instead we'll try to tell the story from a different
angle, so as to not get bogged down in the already-cited recitals
of things like the value of drugs imported by Mena figure Barry
Seal, for example ($3-5 billion, according to one governmental
body with some knack with figures, the IRS). Besides, the "Just-
the-facts-ma'am" trap always ends in dry recitals of charges and
counter-charges. Like the Robert McNamara-esque 'body counts'
from the Vietnam war, it masks a bloody reality in statistics.
And when in doubt, we turn to Mark Twain, who said, "There's
three kinds of liars: Liars, damn liars, and people that quote
statistics."
A tactic we think 'might could work,' as some say in this part of
heaven, to tell the story of gun and drug-running in Arkansas in
the 80's, might be this: if you want to find the truth about
possible US Government involvement in drug-smuggling in the
'80's, you'll have to look around the periphery, out of the
corners of your eyes. Because, face it, these boys are pros. Give
the devil his due. Trade craft is what they DO. And Plausible
Deniability is their middle name(s).
So we've decided to look not for the smoking gun, but for the
bent twigs. The local people, citizens, lawmen, and honest public
officials, whose lives have been changed, in some cases lost,
whose careers have been ruined, because of the invisible elephant
of drug smuggling that came to squat over the Arkansas of the
1980's. We would look for the casualties of friendly fire. What
the Pentagon calls "collateral damage." And we didn't have to
look far, to find a story with an extraordinary human dimension.
* * * * * * * * * *
THE TRAIN DEATHS
The Train Deaths, they're called in Arkansas, and our first stop
on our 'conspiracy' shoot in Arkansas had been right outside
Little Rock, to visit the site of the murders of Kevin Ives and
Don Henry, two high school students who were murdered in 1987.
Avenging their deaths has been a cause celebre for local citizens
and news people for nine years. Its one of those small town cases
where every one in town--except the people with the handcuffs--
seem to know who was responsible for the murder of two youths
whose presence complicated or compromised a drug and/or money
drop. It took place in Saline County, in the bedroom suburbs of
Little Rock, in an area where nearby neighbors had often
registered complaints to police about low-flying aircraft--
presumably on drug and money drops--that would buzz their homes
at night with their lights off.
We had first learned of the story, as one finds out about so many
non- establishment-sanctioned things these days, on the World
Wide Web. (For a complete telling, check out www.idmedia.com,
and, by all means, order the compelling documentary available
from the site.)
Some people will tell you that, today, the Internet is the only
free press in America. These same folks, probably, think that
ever-growing press conglomerate Time Warner's corporate slogan
should be: "Bringing You the Finest in Cradle-to-Grave Thought
Management."
We don't know about that. We confess to having less lofty
ambitions when we first got online. 0ur first big project was to
download some dirty pictures before the advent of the
Communications Decency Act. A juvenile ambition, sure, but we
found it to be a lot harder than we'd thought it would, and
devoted what felt like several man-years to the attempt. It was
our own mini-Manhattan Project, and it taught us more about
computers than everything we'd learned before. (Never
underestimate sex as a motive force; Freud was right.)
But juvenilia soon loses its excitement. The Internet, for us,
had not. We had discovered a whole new world. Information was
loose on Planet Three! And the story we discovered online, and
soon became fascinated with, concerned two high school seniors,
Don Henry and Kevin Ives, who were run over in the middle of the
night by a Union Pacific train on August 23, 1987. All of the
engineers on the train reported that the boys were lying
motionless beneath a tarp, bodies laid out identically across the
tracks, with almost military precision.
Despite this, the Arkansas State Medical Examiner ruled the
deaths accidental. The mother of one of the two boys, Linda Ives,
sensed foul play. So did others in the community. Almost
immediately suspicions among the local citizenry focused on
speculation that the boys' deaths might have resulted from their
stumbling upon a drug drop. Just what--in 1987--would have made
the local population spring to such a conclusion?
This speculation leaped out at us as being more than slightly
curious. "Death by Drug Drop" is not a common cause of death, at
least not where we live. And the citizens of Saline County, where
the deaths took place, seem anything but a conspiracy-mongering
bunch. They live and work in mostly bedroom communities 30
minutes outside the State Capital of Little Rock, with all the
anonymity of middle class people everywhere. They go to church.
They pay their taxes. They mow their lawns. They sew.
Linda Ives is the mother of one of the slain boys. She graciously
allows us to invade her well-kept suburban home with all the
detritus--lights, camera, cables, donuts--a video crew brings
along.
Today she speaks of the death of her son, and the crusade which
has transpired, with a detachment borne of regular retelling of
the tragedy. Still, her composure breaks at almost regular
intervals, as the import of what she has to say sinks home. At
those places her narrative loses its third person feel, and
become a simple story of a mother losing a son.
"To be the mother of a boy killed in one of the most vicious and
notorious murders in Arkansas was, and is, not something easy,"
she begins slowly. "When this happened, in August of 1987, I was
a teller at a local credit union. The very first thing we heard
was that the boys had been shot, and then tied to the train
tracks. Then we're being told, no, the coroner is saying the boys
consumed massive amounts of marijuana, then fell asleep on the
tracks."
The evidence pointing towards murder, and away from accidental
death, was almost immediately apparent. "There were suspicions
immediately in the community," she continues. "We were hearing
things from Kevin's friends, and then from people who'd been at
the scene. Everyone was saying that the ruling of 'accidental'
death was just ridiculous. We got word from one of the paramedics
at the scene that the boys blood wasn't right, that it was dark
and tar-like, that it indicated the boys had been dead for some
time when the train arrived."
And then there was the matter of the tarp.
"The engineer and crew on the train all said the boys had been
under a tarp on the tracks. But the sheriffs office said there
had been no tarp, that it had been an optical illusion. They even
went so far as to tell us they had conducted tests on the boys
clothes, and had found no fibers that would indicate they had
been under a tarp."
The deceit began to unravel, said Mrs. Ives, partly owing to the
fact that her husband, Larry Ives, has been a Union Pacific
engineer for 31 years. He knew the crew that had manned the death
train well. "They (the crew) told Larry that they had even taken
the sheriffs deputies back to where the tarp had landed," she
says grimly. "They pointed it out to them."
"Later we found out that the sheriff's' had done no tests on the
boys' clothes; it was just another in a long string of lies."
Thus the political education of a grieving mother began.
"At first we were just very confused, and frustrated with local
law enforcement. We discovered that the first deputy on the scene
immediately ordered it worked as an accident. When other officers
showed up, they argued strongly that it should be treated as a
crime scene. They were overruled by higher authorities. So, we
learned that it had then been worked as an accident. Learned that
the scene was never even roped off, and that the supposedly
thorough investigation they told me had been done had left my
son's foot in a sneaker lying in plain sight for over two days."
So Linda Ives began a struggle--still ongoing--to bring the boys'
killers to justice. For killers there are, or at least appear to
be, in this story. And like so many of the monstrous sociopaths
that have heavily sprinkled American society for the past thirty
years (I'm thinking, now, just of the ones who conveniently kept
diaries) these killers are still on the loose. They have never
been brought to answer for their crimes, despite seven separate
local, state, and federal investigations into the case.
"As a parent, when I would hear about the "drug problem," I
thought about local kids," states Mrs. Ives. "You never think the
"drug problem" concerns local law enforcement, and public
officials. But slowly, over time, that's what I came to believe."
First there were the uncooperative state officials.
"We held a press conference, and laid out everything. The media
was very supportive, and that, along with public outrage, helped
get the case to a grand jury. But from state officials, we got
absolutely no cooperation. We ran into brick walls everywhere."
The stonewalling even included refusals to obey court orders to
turn over documents and test results on the part of the Arkansas
State Crime Lab.
"The Little Rock Crime Lab defied a court order to supply the
things we were requesting in order to have a second autopsy done.
So we called the State Attorney General's Office. They said it
was illegal for the crime lab to defy our court order, but that
they would not intervene in any way. When I asked--given that
they wouldn't help enforce the court order--what recourse I had,
they said, 'none.' "
But 'murder will out,' as the Bard said. The parents' crusade
resulted in a grand jury investigation, which ruled the deaths
criminal. The second autopsy, done by a noted Atlanta forensic
pathologist, showed that the face of one of the boys had been
smashed in before death, and that his cheek still bore the
imprint of a rifle butt. The other boy had been stabbed in the
back.
All of which the State Medical Examiner, Dr. Fahmy Malak, had
failed somehow to ascertain.
"There have been now a total of seven local, state, and federal
investigations into the murders on those train tracks. And over
the course of those seven investigations I've learned some
amazing things," Linda Ives states.
"We've learned the sheriff's lied about testing for fibers on the
boys clothes. We've learned that Don Henry was stabbed, that
Kevin's face was crushed with a rifle butt, that the weight of
their lungs, filled with blood, was clear proof from the
beginning that they didn't die from the impact of that train.
"But the most amazing thing we learned was that Kevin and Don
were killed because of a very large drug smuggling operation that
involved public officials and public corruption, even in the
murders themselves.
"There were witnesses to my son's murder; witnesses who have
passed FBI polygraphs, placing government officials on the train
tracks with those boys before they were murdered. And this
information is also corroborated by other witnesses."
Mrs. Ives' pauses, and we call a halt to shooting. My crew and I
sit in stunned silence at what we have been hearing. Linda sees
this, and smiles, almost for the first time. When we had arrived,
we'd made much of the 'small-town-y' nature of the directions she
had given us to her home, directions a little in the old 'Turn
left where the old Ben Franklin used to be' school. Now the
tables have been turned. Linda looks bemused at our cityboy
naiveté.
"Its all true," she states matter-of-factly. "Just ask Jean."
* * * * * * * * * *
The "Jean" she is referring to is Jean Duffey. Today Jean Duffey
is a high school algebra teacher in a suburb of Houston Texas, a
handsome woman with short-cropped brown hair, a woman who looks
just like the soccer moms we heard so much about before the
recent election. But six years ago she was the prosecuting
attorney of a federally funded Drug Task Force in Saline County
Arkansas, whose undercover agents began to come to her with
revelations about the murders of the two boys.
And no soccer mom encounters I'd ever had prepared me for what
she told us right at the beginning of our interview.
"The FBI has eyewitnesses to the slayings," she tells us in that
matter-of-fact tone affected by those who, for professional
reasons, are forced to cultivate as much detachment as they can.
"One witness at the scene even passed a polygraph. But still, to
this date, nothing has been done. It's been this way from day
one, with seven separate investigations, each one stopped."
The initial hue and cry by local citizens and the media, Duffey
explains, was directed at the unbelievable verdict of the State
Medical Examiner, who ruled the boys' deaths accidental. This
forced the second examination we'd heard about from Linda Ives.
Remember? The one showing that one boy had been stabbed in the
back, while the other's face had been smashed in, bearing the
imprint of a rifle butt?
Hearing this stomach-wrenching information related to us on
camera for a second time in two days, I had a curious reaction. I
felt slightly giddy. There was a disconnect between the events
being related, and my reaction. I was tempted to ask: "What could
Dr. Malak have been thinking about, that day those boys' lifeless
bodies crossed his examining room table? Lunch?"
Later I was to feel that my feelings were not as inappropriate as
they appeared at first blush. How can one react in the face of
what feels like sheer malignant evil? As I listened further, the
threads of--dare I say it?--conspiracy--began to weave tighter,
and I began thinking of Dr. Malak not as of someone merely
incompetent, but as of someone both incompetent and sinister,
sort of a backwoods Joseph Mengele.
"Fahmy Malak was bulletproof in Arkansas; he was completely
protected," states Duffey. "And that was true, even in the face
of incredible adverse publicity from the media after the second
examination showed how clearly ridiculous his ruling of
accidental death was. We are way beyond the bounds of
incompetence here; we are into criminal intent."
So, I asked, was Dr. Malek an accessory to murder? Ever the
prosecutor, Duffy considered her words carefully. "Accessory to
murder," she said slowly, "is different from conspiracy to cover
up, which is what I believe Dr. Malak was involved in."
But we are getting slightly ahead of ourselves. I ask how Ms.
Duffey's Drug Task Force came to be involved in the Train Deaths
murder investigation.
"I had hired seven undercover investigators," she explains.
"Their job was to make drug buys, and work their way up the
ladder to drug suppliers. That's who we were after. But the
connections began to lead almost immediately to public officials,
who were either protecting the drug trade or actively involved in
the drug trade themselves."
"And the person whose name came up most often was also the person
who had been the special prosecutor in the initial grand jury
investigation into the Train Deaths, a nearly year-long
proceeding that did nothing but establish that the cause of death
was not accidental, but was indeed homicide."
"His name is Dan Harmon. It became apparent almost immediately
that Dan Harmon was a key player in the drug trafficking activity
taking place in Saline county."
Duffey pauses, remembering. "About three months after we were up
and running, one of my undercover investigators asked if he could
open the Trains Deaths case, which was, at that point, two-and-
a-half years old, and perhaps Arkansas' most famous unsolved
mystery. It had been featured twice on the TV program, and people
who were possible witnesses were turning up dead."
"I asked him why he thought that we should get involved. 'Two
reasons,' he told me. 'First, because its drug related. And
second, because we can solve it.'
"Why, I asked him, did he think we could solve a crime that other
investigations had been unable to? Because, he said, the other
investigations were cover-ups. No real investigation had yet been
conducted thoroughly and forthrightly."
Duffey's Drug Task Force investigators proceeded to develop
startling evidence that had previously been ignored. First, on
the drug-related aspect of the crimes.
"One of the first things my investigator did was to interview
people living in the vicinity of where Kevin and Don were
murdered. He discovered that drug drops had been rumored in that
area over the six months before the boys murders, that citizens
had filed reports of low-flying aircraft buzzing over in the
middle of the night with their lights turned off.
"When a citizen made one of these complaints, an officer would go
out and take a report, and then do nothing. No investigation was
done. These reports were sitting in the sheriff's office when
Kevin and Don were murdered. But the connection between the
planes and the deaths was not made."
Duffey allows herself a wry smile "I found it very hard to
believe that my undercover officer could see the obvious, while
no one else could."
Duffey continues speaking in her prosecutorial monotone, telling
how a confessed drug dealer had testified that she had, as part
of her participation in an "officially" sanctioned drug ring,
picked up cocaine that had been 'dropped' on the train tracks in
the same vicinity.
Apparently, cocaine was raining from the darkened night skies
over Arkansas.
"The system kept me from prosecuting," she continues. "Our Drug
Task Force was actually doomed from the beginning. On the very
day I was appointed to head the drug task force, Gary Arnold, my
boss, walked into my office, stared at me hard, and instructed me
not to use the Drug Task Force to investigate any public
officials."
There was a massive cover-up, Duffey states in an even tone. "My
drug task force was shut down cold. Because we were getting too
close. We were not allowed to get there."
What happened next? "I got smeared," says Duffey. "There was a
massive smear campaign against me, led by Dan Harmon, who fed
misleading and untrue information to the local papers."
So Jean Duffey's career began to follow a familiar trajectory,
one often seen in those who refuse to look the other way. Doug
Thompson, a local reporter on the main Little Rock paper, the
Arkansas Democrat, led a campaign against her, while being fed
information by the man who would later became the focal point of
suspicions.
And, at that point, Duffey says, she realized she could do no
more, and took the case to the US Attorney.
And the smear campaign? The one that ran courageous and crusading
prosecuting attorney Jean Duffey right out of state? What about
it?
Duffey almost smiles. "Today I realize, after working with the
FBI for eighteen months beginning in March of 1995, what the
basis was for Dan Harmon's viciousness. I now know that Dan
Harmon was on the tracks with the boys the night that they were
murdered."
This was the point during the shooting of this story at which I
began to feel like the Greek Chorus at an outdoor play. I was
thinking of a writer from the heartland of America. I was
thinking of Kurt Vonnegut, who gave us a refrain so constantly-
repeated that it seemed to have become a mantra in the 60's. 'So
it goes,' his characters would say. 'So it goes.'
But I started this tale in Mena, and the alert reader may be
forgiven for asking, how does Mena connect with two unfortunate
murders which, let's grant for the sake of argument, may well
have been committed in the course of drug smuggling activities in
Arkansas, and may well have involved corrupt officials?
What does Mena have to do with the Train Deaths, events that
occurred half a state away?
Well, this, for starters: if the drug smuggling in Mena, Arkansas
was widespread and pervasive, it would still just be the tip of
the iceberg, albeit a very big tip. What Russell Welch,
acknowledged as the expert in Arkansas drug smuggling, even by
his drug-smuggling foes in those times, such as Barry Seal's
brother-in-law Bill Bottoms, (who has lately discovered a highly
vocal mission to portray Mena as a myth) could tell us, was
simple: was Mena an anomaly, an isolated incidence in an isolated
place?
Or did what happened there bespeak a larger corruption of the
Arkansas bodily public in those heady years of the 80's, years
before the American public at large began to wonder whether the
drug policy of its government was Just Say NO...or Just Fly Low.
After all, cocaine had never been known to rain from the skies
anywhere I lived during the 80's. And I lived in Los Angeles.
{{{850912, Drew Thorton, Knoxville, TN.}}}
We were on a journey, we now realized, to see the Wizard. But we
had two brief stops first.
Our first stop was to visit with the reporter whose fingerprints
are all over the case, Doug Thompson of the Arkansas Democrat,
the state's main paper, since it bought its competition. It's
located in a handsome gray stone building near the heart of
Little Rock.
Thompson seemed happy to see us, and agreed to talk, but not on-
camera. "Of all the TV people who have been down here to cover
Mena," he told me. "You're the first one to stop by to see me.
And my name's on all the clips."
Indeed it was. Thompson is a burly affable man, easy to like. He
had covered the Train Deaths through most of its permutations,
over almost a seven year span. But his easy manner seemed at odds
with what Jean Duffey had told us about him, that she had been
hounded out of state at least partly by his coverage of her. We
asked about his role.
"Driving that woman out of state is the thing I'm proudest about
in my years at this paper," he stated. "Did you know, while she
ran the task force, her 18-year old daughter used her mother's
position to obtain a drivers' license stating she was 21?"
I did my best to look shocked. Shocked! And I was. As soon as he
retailed this innocuous-enough but still faintly scurrilous piece
of information, I became uneasily aware of being in the presence
of someone who might not turn out to be a disinterested
information broker to the out-of-state truth-seeker.
An 18-year old girl procuring fake ID did not seem like a capital
crime to me. Maybe it is to you. But it did strike me as just the
sort of thing someone attempting to prove a point might dredge
up. Suddenly it seemed an agenda had reared its ugly head.
"She's crazy, Jean is," he continues. "Jean Duffey and Dan Harmon
are both crazy, they both belong in a lunatic asylum, just in
separate wings."
Ah-Hah! The plague-on-both-your-houses defense. We smiled. Doug
smiled. Later, when we did stand-up on our story, on the sidewalk
just outside the paper's offices, security guards stood uneasily
just inside the main door.
* * * * * * * * * *
THE ART OF DISINFORMATION
That left just one stone left unturned. Billy Bob "Bear" Bottoms
is a genuine Louisiana piece of work, as anyone with two
nicknames can be safely assumed to be. He is also the former
brother-in-law of Barry Seal, and one of his drug pilots during
the 80's, as well as a former US Navy pilot.
Lately Bob Bottoms seems to have discovered a new vocation:
destroyer of what he calls the "Mena Myth," first in a Penthouse
article, widely quoted by debunkers of the San Jose Mercury News
"Dark Alliance" series on the CIA, the Contras, and Cocaine. And
then he has surfaced suddenly to become a highly visible presence
at those meeting grounds on the Internet where topics like these
are bandied about, inspiring heated discussion in forums and
information lists like CIA/Drugs and
alt.current.events.clinton.whitewater (Yes, there really is such
a 'place.' Isn't cyberspace grand?)
The clear consensus about Bottoms was that he was, at some third
party's behest, supplying disinformation to lead investigators
seeking an intelligence agency hand in drug smuggling in Arkansas
off the scent. He admitted smuggling massive amounts of drugs
(and had the newspaper clippings to prove it). And he also
admitted to working for the DEA for six years (more clippings).
What he didn't admit was to ever having gotten caught smuggling
drugs, a fact which normally precedes contrition in drug
smugglers. On this point most knowledgeable observers see a hole
in the bottom of Mr. Bottoms curriculum vitae.
We were also warned about the dangers of meeting with him. A
dispatch reached us alleging that Bottoms has been known to plant
drugs on innocent people and then turn them in.
So when we arrived for our meeting, at a hotel in Baton Rouge, we
eyed him a bit nervously. But he has a disarming smile, and
intelligent blue eyes to go with a brown bomber jacket, jeans and
a heavily-weathered if handsome face.
The thrust of Bottoms' argument is that Mena was a small airfield
from which a small drug operation took place over a small period
of time during the 1980's. Period. During our conversation over
breakfast, we took no notes, but gauged, as best we could, the
man.
And to our chagrin, we found we liked him. He seemed more a
swashbuckling type than the kind of sleazeball we've all seen in
movies like "Scarface."
He made much of the fact that several of the principals in the
Mena story, including, most notably, Terry Reed, were liars,
people for whom he shared, along with Russell Welch, a fine
contempt. He had even posted to the Internet his correspondence
with Welch, from which one could glean a wary mutual respect.
I took two things from our inconclusive encounter. First I
realized what true 'babes in the woods' most of us would-be
truth-detectors must appear to people schooled in the arts of
dissemination, as Bottoms has been. And, second, I wanted,
despite the chill temperature, to crawl under our crew van to
check for packages that weren't there before.
* * * * * * * * * *
Russell Welch arrived unannounced and without ceremony at
our motel in Mena. He looked every inch the undercover
investigator he no longer is: alert green eyes, slightly
slouched, nondescript clothing. The man seems born to skulk.
What he agreed to do with us was this: go to dinner, but not eat
dinner, at a local place called the Cutting Board, which served
hamburgers the size of small flying saucers. Or of small fedoras,
if you're one of the few who has not yet seen (or been aboard) a
saucer. He would talk to us, he said, but not with cameras
present.
At this point, perhaps a word or two about Russell Welch for
those of you tuning in late might be in order. Although hundreds
of thousands of words have already been written about him, his
story is not yet a well-known one.
Trooper Russell Welch of the Arkansas State Police was assigned
to investigate drug smuggler Barry Seal in the early '80's. Seal
had made the small Interregional Mountain Airport in Mena his
home field. Thinking this not an entirely peachy idea, the State
Police put Welch on the case.
Seal had been in Special Forces in the 60's. In 1972, as a TWA
pilot, he had been arrested for smuggling explosives for anti-
Castro Cubans. Seal's C-123K cargo plane, "The Fat Lady," was
procured by Seal from Air America, the known CIA subsidiary.
After Seal 'sold' the plane, it crashed in 1986, with Eugene
Hasenfus on board. This marked the first public exposure of
Oliver North's secret contra war, set up in contravention of a
Congressional Act, the Boland Amendment, which made such activity
illegal.
There has been much talk about interference in Welch's
investigation, and about prosecutions which were subverted. Welch
himself has been quoted to this effect. He had his career ruined
by his seemingly quixotic quest to bring drug smuggling to a halt
at the Mena airport. He is either a pitiful Dudley Do-Right, or
an American hero of the first order.
After spending the briefest possible amount of time with him, I'm
clear about where I come down on that question. I'd name my kid
after him, had I one to name.
)From this brief outline, several things should be clear to anymeathead
with the slightest hint of gray matter beneath his cap.
A secret government operation was run out of this remotest
possible outpost of the Empire. A "Bamboozle in the Boondocks."
Some of it involved drugs.
And nobody bothered to let Trooper Welch in on the joke.
The punch line was not too funny for Russell Welch. He
'contracted' anthrax, the military warfare biological agent
variety. His doctor told him someone had sprayed it in his face.
Then an FBI agent was about to arrest him for illegal
wiretapping, but a local sheriff dissuaded him, on the grounds
that Welsh had been in the hospital dying of anthrax at the time.
(If you're not Welch, some of this seems funny.)
Finally, Welsh retired from the Arkansas State Police. Alive. But
not through lack of trying.
Today Welch is an understandably wary man. At dinner he outlined
for us the way things went at Mena.
"The whole method of smuggling was an excellent system that
Seal's men had been carefully instructed in. Flying back, they
would 'kick drugs' at a previously unknown spot. After the drugs
were 'kicked,' the coordinates of the spot were given to a ground
or a helicopter crew and they would then go to a remote area and
pick them up. Then the planes would land back in Mena, and they
would be clean."
Welch pointedly mentions that Barry Seal was neither the first
nor the last drug smuggler to call Mena home. We coaxed him, "So
you're saying there were smugglers here before..."
"Sure. Oh yeah. Before Seal and after Seal. And I assume there
are smugglers here right now."
Be still my beating heart... This is the first reference I've
heard to current drug smuggling out of Mena Arkansas. Russell
grins. He's got a good sense of humor. "Its legal here."
He goes on to relate a story about a local radio station with a
Howard Stern wanna-be who had announced one morning that the big
news that day was that the local prosecuting attorney had
legalized cocaine out at Mena airport. You could tell Welsh was
trying to be funny, but his heart wasn't in it.
"Did it come as a surprise to you," we asked him, "when the CIA
finally admitted that they had conducted training at Mena?"
"Oh, no."
"That was something you knew?"
"Yeah, that was commonplace. But long long ago."
"Are they telling everything?"
"No they're not," Welsh answers slowly. "They just mentioned this
one two-week operation they had here, which I suspect was testing
of an airplane. They had some top-secret spy plane out there, and
the deputies caught them, and everyone at the airport knew what
was going on, word got around, and so they eventually went to the
local sheriff and gave him one of those little coins that they
give to people who discover them."
Here's news! Coins! Ferret out a black op somewhere, and you'll
get a commemorative medallion.
"When the deputies drove up on them at the airport one of them
swept the area with his flashlight and saw people standing around
wearing those labsuits that look like spacesuits. It caused a bit
of fear."
Welsh is grinning again. "Part of that operation's still here."
But that's it. Nothing more is clearly forthcoming. We change our
tack. "The FBI tried to frame you for an illegal wiretap?"
"Yeah. Fortunately I was in the hospital dying at the time and
muffed their case up a bit."
"You were dying of anthrax, correct?"
"Yeah. That's what I was diagnosed and treated for."
"How did you find that out?
Welsh doesn't grin this time. "Doctor says, 'you're dying,' or
words to that effect..."
We ask him about Bill Bottoms, and get another taste of reality,
covert-style.
"Old Billy Bottoms is a liar. But Billy tells a lot of truth.
Billy Bottoms is who he says he is."
Ah. The art of disinformation.
"One of the biggest things Billy Bob is doing wrong is not saying
in posts that he's limited, that he doesn't know everything. This
operation with Barry Seal isn't the limit of what took place
here. Barry Seal was very limited. Barry is a cocaine smuggler,
he got busted, he rolled over, he got burned and then he got
killed. Barry Seal wasn't in charge of nuthin.'
"From 1984 on, Barry Seal is trying to stay out of prison.
Struggling to keep his importance, struggling with Billy Bottoms'
buddy Jake Jacobson that he (Bottoms) stayed with after Seal was
dead, begging him for something to keep him important. Something
that will keep him important in the DEA's eyes, and then they
dumped him in July of '84, and that's when he really started
struggling--he's trying to help them find Pablo Escobar.
And when Duncan and I interviewed him in December of '85, he was
a scared desperate man. He wasn't in charge of nothing. He is
trying to stay alive. He knew a contract was out on him then. He
talked about it. He's trying to stay out of prison. And he's
scared to death of Arkansas. Because he wasn't protected; he was
protected everywhere, except at the state level in Arkansas."
"Was that because of you?"
"Because of me. He talks about it in the transcription of my and
Duncan's interview with him. It was almost a defeatist attitude.
Like, I'm a dead man anyway. And two months later, he was a dead
man."
Welsh was passionate now, and he went on to talk about the
numerous congressional subcommittees, "every subcommittee that's
been through here--four or five of them--are independent hotshot
investigations to expose everything--and all they end up exposing
is witnesses."
He mentioned the name of one, relating how she had been exposed
to peril after being assured of something he referred to as "a
congressional umbrella." He snorted derisively. "I'm not sure
that there is such a thing. They dumped her, they forgot about
her, but she was exposed for what she did."
Welch stands angrily. We're uncertain what comes next. Its
getting late. Maybe we've had our interview. "C'mon," Welch says.
"I'll give you a tour of the airport."
* * * * * * * * * *
MIDNIGHT RIDE TO MENA
We have no tape recording of what follows, so paraphrases are
inexact. Even if we had been carrying a recorder, Welch pulled
the old trick of cranking the radio up in his car as he drove us
around the outside of the Interregional Mountain Airport.
But we caught, clearly, the gist of what he had to say. Mena is
not about just things that went on in the early 80's. Mena is
about things that are going on right now.
"See that hangar?" he would say, pointing out this, or that
building looming in the darkness. "That's owned by..." And then
there would be an anecdote.
"That's owned by ______, who today owns almost half the airport,"
he said at one stop on our tour. "He doesn't exist in history
back past a safe house in Baltimore in 1972."
Or: "That hangar's owned by ____ ___ . He smuggled heroin through
Laos back in the Seventies."
Or: "That hangar's owned by a guy who just went bankrupt. So
what's he do? Flies to Europe for more money. Don't tell me crime
don't pay!"
He shows us a half dozen lumbering Fokker aircraft parked on an
apron. "The DEA's been tracking those planes back and forth to
Columbia for a while now."
It goes on like this for a while. At the end, he seems spent, but
satisfied. He looks over across the car seat at me. "You know how
many nights I spent out here in the dark, watching planes take
off and land?" he asks softly.
Then he tells me one of his secrets. He illustrates by getting
out of the car, and walking over to a parked plane. As he exits,
I notice a revolver lying on the drivers' seat he's just vacated.
It seems that one of Trooper Welch's few pleasures, back in those
days when he was attempting to bring drug smugglers to heel, was,
when the call of nature overcame him on his lonely night vigils,
to relieve himself on the side of a plane that flew drugs in and
out of American airspace with impunity.
It seems a perfect gesture. They may get you in the end, but,
fuck it--piss on 'em. A rebel gesture, purely American. As
American as--well, lets save that for the big close. Trooper
Welch's eyes grow solemn, even in the dark.
"I could tell you what's going on, but when you leave here, I'm
still here with my family. And just the fact that you're going to
do a television show, that may not even mention me or anything
you got from me...just the fact that you're going to do it is
gonna cause me a bunch of shit. It always has, and it always
will. Its gonna cause me problems that you can't even define."
* * * * * * * * * *
THE MISSING DRUG DROP
We had made our pilgrimage to Mena. And we felt duly chastened by
what we think we learned. But the tale we set out to tell, after
all, was a little story that should belong to its two main
protagonists, Linda Ives and Jean Duffy.
Linda Ives, mother of one of the slain boys, has made a crusade
out of finding his killers and bringing them to justice. She
thinks she's fulfilled the first of those two objectives. Its the
second one she wonders about.
"This is not just a case of local corruption," she says with
quiet determination. "We knew that early on because the state
police just weren't doing their job. Then there were Federal
investigations, and we were promised indictments would come out
of them. But they were shut down too.
"Who has the power to shut down a federal investigation?" she
demanded.
"We too had heard about Barry Seal's operation dropping drugs and
cash around the state. We made contact with a pilot who claimed
to have many times flown the drop at the place where my son died.
Local law enforcement was in charge of securing those drops, he
told us.
"And just prior to Kevin and Don's deaths a drop at that location
had gone missing...so local law enforcement was on Red Alert.
They were waiting for somebody to try to steal their next drop.
And Kevin and Don happened by. Several witnesses place two police
officers beating up two boys at a little grocery store right by
where they found the boys' bodies...
"I believe that Kevin and Don were grabbed by these two officers,
interrogated, and subsequently killed."
"These two officers, whom I believe to be Kirk Lane and Jay
Campbell, are Pulaski County narcotics officers. They are good
friends with (former Clinton friend and convicted drug
distributor) Dan Lasater, and have flown in his jet many times.
"I believe the reason these investigations have gone nowhere is
because of the connections of the two officers seen beating and
kicking those boys, Kirk Lane and Jay Campbell, to Dan Lasater,
and on up to Bill Clinton, and I also believe these connections
filter down to the criminals and thugs that are public officials
to this day here in Saline county.
"I believe that the evidence is overwhelming that Bill Clinton
knew what was going on in Mena Arkansas and made no effort to
investigate or eradicate it."
In a more measured but no less impassioned way Jean Duffey
largely concurs.
"Did you ever in your wildest dreams while you were in law
school," we asked her, "entertain the idea that the U.S.
Government condoned smuggling drugs?"
"No," she responds. " I did not."
"Who is responsible, ultimately, for those boys' deaths? Where
did the chain of command end?"
She hesitates. "In my opinion, I believe it began with the CIA
smuggling drugs, so whoever was giving the command might be who
is ultimately responsible."
"Is there any explanation you can think of for seven thwarted
investigations into the Train Deaths other than government
complicity in drug smuggling in Arkansas?"
"Absolutely no other explanation."
"Was Barry Seal a big enough drug smuggler to conduct a drug
smuggling operation that involved drug drops near those train
tracks with the regularity to provoke citizen complaints about
low flying aircraft?"
"Probably not."
"But you clearly believe the people responsible for those two
boys' deaths were working for someone else?"
"Yes."
"And that they were involved in a criminal enterprise of
surprising scope and sweep?"
"Yes."
"Where does that lead you to speculate?"
"As a prosecuting attorney I had to stick to the facts. But prior
to getting to a jury I'm allowed to speculate, and process all
the information I have from whatever direction it comes. What in
my opinion has been involved is a CIA or rogue CIA operation,
conducted by the CIA or CIA operatives. To smuggle drugs into the
United States from South America, using Barry Seal's drug
smuggling operation in Mena.
Duffey stopped a moment, surprised, I believe, at the thoughts
she was voicing. Then she continued. "I believe there is a
possibility that Oliver North was involved with the National
Security Council; that Oliver North was working for....
A noise startled her. She stopped. I called for the cameraman, in
some exasperation, to stop tape. Jean looked at me, and although
we had been having a conversation for over an hour now, it was as
if she saw me for the first time.
"I have not talked about this before," she protested.
"But everyone else has," I answered.
"I'm not the one to answer questions about Oliver North smuggling
drugs in the Iran/Contra affair," she stated tentatively.
Then, I witnessed something that felt extraordinary. I watched as
she let herself go... Her voice grew stronger as she continued:
"Again, sticking to the facts, I know that when North was before
Congress in the Congressional Hearings about the Iran/Contra
affair, two questions came up about Mena Arkansas. And both
times, the investigation went into closed door session...
"Now, if Oliver North had not been involved in Mena, wouldn't he
have simply said, 'No, I don't know anything about Mena?"
"Why did the committee go behind closed doors? That's a fact that
can't be ignored."
"This is an opinion now I'm asking for," I told her. "If Oliver
North, or someone on Oliver North's level, had not been involved
in Mena, there would not have been a Mena, would there?"
"That's a reasonable assumption that I would have to agree with."
"And if there had been no Mena, there would have been no train
track deaths either, would there?"
She blinked. I wasn't sure if she knew where I was leading with
these questions, but she sensed it was somewhere she wanted to
think very closely about first.
"That's not as clear cut," she said slowly. "There could still
have been the murders."
"Let me try it this way," I said. "Was even a powerful drug
smuggler like Barry Seal big enough to have conducted a drug
smuggling operation with the regularity to provoke citizen
complaints about low flying aircraft?"
"Probably not. And in fact, it wasn't until the time frame after
Oliver North got involved in Mena that there was so much drug
activity, low flying planes, over those train tracks."
I took a deep breath. "So, does it seem at all possible to you,
that if Oliver North had not been charged with flying guns to the
contras and bringing back cocaine that could be then sold to
finance the contra war,that those two boys might still be alive
today?"
There was a long silence. Then, almost in a whisper, she replied.
"It seems apparent that they would be."
* * * * * * * * * *
THE SECRET HISTORY
So, we'd stared into the Heart of Darkness. The Heart of Darkness
had stared right back.
Allegations and speculation are not proof. The truth, indeed, is
still out there.
But, for what little they're worth, here are my speculations
about our journey into the secret history of our life and times.
I don't believe that the 'drug smuggler' Billy Bob Bottoms is any
more a drug smuggler than you or I. I believe him to be a paid
representative of the government of the United States of America
acting under the doctrines of plausible deniability. Why? Just a
hunch. I liked him too much. He was a Navy pilot. His brother in
law Barry Seal was a Special Op guy. These were our best and our
bravest men.
Here's what I would like to know. Who convinced men like Bear
Bottoms that what they were doing was in the best interests of
our country? What valid reasons might there be for our country's
national security apparatus to be involved in the drug industry?
Unless someone steps forward to make the argument for why this
might be in our national interest, I'll wonder.
And here's what I've learned. Some things we'll never know for
sure. The opposition's way too good for that. For example, I'm
convinced, to the depths of my heart, that there was a coup
d'etat in the United States of America in 1963. That the bad guys
never got caught. And that, chances are, they still run things.
I will never, as long as I live, forget our 'Midnight ride to
Mena,' seated beside tour guide and American hero Russell Welch.
I'm convinced that what I saw there that night was a fully
functional and operational secret government installation.
By that, I do not mean a secret installation of the government of
the United States of America. Unh-uh. What I believe I saw, and
what I believe exists in Mena, Arkansas today... is an
installation of the secret government that runs the government of
the United States of America.
And here's what I suspect: that today, long after Oliver North
has become nothing but a minor league radio DJ... and long after
the contra war is just a fading memory of yet another minor
league war, our government--yours and mine--is going about the
lucrative worldwide business of drug production and distribution.
It's the secret heartbeat of America. And it's as American as
apple pie.
Daniel Hopsicker
January 29,1997
All rights reserved.
[Daniel Hopsicker has now finished the TV documentary mentioned
in this story, as well as a book. A tape of the documentary as
well as a pre-publication version of the book are available
through the Washington Weekly web site at:
http://www.federal.com.]
Published in the May 12, 1997 Issue of The Washington Weekly.
Non-commercial reposting permitted with this message intact.
Forwarded article from Larry-Jennie ;
may not contain poster's opinions.
Jai Maharaj
http://www.flex.com/~jai
Om Shanti
Subject: Mena Airport, C-123s & More
From: Larry-Jennie
Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 20:06:40 -0700
Message-ID: <338A4FC0.14A3@interaccess.com>
Organization: InterAccess, Chicago's best Internet Service Provider
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy,alt.impeach.clinton,alt.president.clinton,
alt.politics.clinton,alt.politics.bush,alt.politics.org.fbi,alt.journalism,
alt.news-media,alt.politics.media,alt.politics.usa.republican,
talk.politics.drugs
(Russell Welch is a retired Arkansas State Police investigator)
Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 17:26:50 -0500
From: truegrit (Russell Welch)
To: lar-jen@interaccess.com
Larry:
The Mena Airport is located about one mile from the southwestern city
limits of Mena. It is still in a relatively densely populated area.
A major highway (by local standards), Ark. State Hwy. 8, runs within
about one or two hundred feet of the north edge of the runway. You
can legally park your car and walk to the end of the strip. A major
county road runs along the west side of the airport, giving access to
the businesses on that side of the runway. The hangers are no more
than 30 or 40 feet off the road. Another major county road runs along
the south end of the strip, about 300 feet (maybe more) from the south
edge of the strip. Again, you can legally park your car and walk out
there is you want to.
These are major thorough fares, by local standards. They all have a
lot of daily traffic. A short state maintained hwy runs along the
east end of the runway, Ark State Hwy 980. This hwy runs maybe half
the length of the strip. After that it turns into a dirt road and
provides access to private land and residences. A local bootlegger
used to live down that road. The area surrounding the airport is
peppered with houses. In addition to that, immediately accross the
road from the airport, on the west side, there is a housing
sub-division. Across the highway on the north side, there is a
trailer park. I'll scan a map of the area and send it to you.
My house is located about a mile-and-a-half northwest of the airport.
Al Hadaways house is about a mile due north of the airport. You can't
land or take off, using the north approach, without going directly
over Hadaway's house. You couldn't fire up the engines of the C-123
without hearing it from my house, and there's a hill between my house
and the airport. From Hadaway's house, I would be surprized if you
couldn't feel the walls shake a little bit.
During that time, when Hadaway wasn't working at being a sheriff, he
was at the airport. He was a pilot and loved aviation. He eventually
quit the sheriff's office, after being completely worn down (burned
out) as a result of the Seal investigation. His response to the
media, when he quit was, "How can I arrest people for relatively minor
drug offenses when cocaine smugglers go untouched?"
Most of the laborers who worked at the Mena Airport were local
citizens with families who took part in all of the social affairs of
the community. I went to church with some of them. One of my fellow
church members actually worked at Rich Mountain Aviation while Seal
was there. A good man with a good family. Unfortunately, Freddie
Hampton was able to moniter me at church and this man would get
harrassed and intimidated for so much as shaking hands with me during
fellowship. I never put him and his family into jeopardy by
soliciting information from him, but towards the end, he got tired of
the intimidation and started volunteering information to me.
The local people have watched activity at the Mena Airport and don't
approve of any illegal activity. Local policticians and certain
businessmen have ranted for years that adverse publicity is hurting
the airport and "local people are tired of it." That's wrong. Local
people are tired of illegal activity at the airport; but, know that
they need to keep their mouths shut. In Arkansas truth is declared by
the people with the power. Those who try to oppose that, can get
squashed. The safest and easiest thing for them to do, is to keep
their mouths shut and enjoy their families.
That's why I had some consternation as I saw that my involvement in an
investigation was becoming inevitable. I knew that I would be on my
own and essentially living with the enemy. There was no place for me
to go and be anonymous. Although, Billy Bottoms says that all of
Seal's people were non-violent, it would have been stupid for me to
think that, at the time. On top of all of this, being in a small
town, there was a constant flow of information, mixed with a gernerous
smattering of gossip.
People were constantly calling me to give me information on a wide
range of subjects, including activity at the airport. It was the same
way with Hadaway. When Seal flew the C-123 away, for the final time,
I could hear the engines firing up over the air conditioner at my
house. I still got two telephone calls from people telling that Seal
was about to leave in the Fat Lady.
I went out to the airport and watched for a while as they worked on it
at Rich Mountain Aviation. When it appeared that they would not be
leaving any time soon, I went back home. A couple of hours later, I
heard the engines fire up again. This time I got four telephone
calls. I went back out to the airport and found the C-123 at the
north end of the runway. I parked directly across from it on the east
side of the runway, at Rose Upholstry. He tinkered with it for a
while and then gave it some gas. Flames shot out behing the engines
for about 20 feet. If anybody had been in the car with me, we would
not have been able to talk because of the noise. A C-123 makes a lot
of noise.
I know that Seal could see me because I was right across from him and
he looked my way a couple of times. I watched to see if he would flip
me off as he began his take-off. He didn't pay any attention to me.
I guess he was busy flying the plane. As I was leaving the airport I
stopped and talked to an acquantance at the one of the hangers. He
made some jokes about the Fat Lady and I went back home.
The point I'm trying to make is that, sure - the C-123 could have made
some trips without Hadaway or me knowing about it; but, there were so
many people at and around that airport that it was impossible for it
to come and go without somebody knowing. Very few of the people that
live next to the airport have anything to do with the businesses
there. Some of them did not mind reporting suspicious activity on
occasion. Jack Rose of Rose Upholstry volunteered his business to me
for surveillance at night time. Everybody knew that Seal was a
cocaine smuggler and at least some of the other businessmen didn't
like the fact that Freddie Hampton had brought him to their airport.
I can say that the C-123 left at least a couple of times. Maybe, it
left three of four times; but, I don't think so.
The area around the strip at Nella is also relatively congested. A
major county road runs along one end of the strip. While Seal was
active at the Mena airport, there was a thin line of saplings grown up
between the strip and the county road. The sapplings are cleared off
now. You can park your car on the side of the county road and walk a
few feet onto the strip. Another road, that appears to be kept up by
the county runs along the other end of the strip. A private drive,
with public access runs along the north edge of the Nella strip.
Nonetheless, on at least one occasion two game wardens were rudely
ordered away from one of these roads by men who identified themselves
as federal agents. The game wardens were responding to a complaint of
night hunters. But, that's another story; much of which hasn't been
made public. I'm sure we can get into that later.
There are houses scattered out all over that area. This area of the
Ouachita National Forest has been used for years for some Special
Forces Training. Back in the 80's Fort Chaffee, at Fort Smith, about
85 miles north of Mena, was converted to what they call a "Joint
Readiness Training Center." I found out from a newspaper clipping on
the west coast, read to me by a federal investigator, that, included
in the JRTC mission, was the training of South and Central American
military forces. There was some reason for me to believe that they
mayhave crossed over that line when they used the area to train El
Salvadorian assassins.
Seal probably thought that the things he said and did at Rich Mountain
Aviation were kept in confidence but that was not the case. As soon
as Seal left, Freddie would tell somebody and before long it would
spread over a wide area. After Seal started doing some legal stuff,
I'm sure that Freddie couldn't wait to tell someone. As soon as Seal
told Freddie Hampton or Joe Evans that he was bringing in a C-123 to
do a sting with the DEA, the story was bound to spread, and Hadaway,
without a doubt would have been one of the first to hear it.
There was another C-123. As far as I know, this other plane never
came to Mena. It was camouflaged like the Fat Lady. It was being
monitored by the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and a sheriff's office,
two counties into Oklahoma from Mena. The OBN dealt with me on the
subject because they thought it was the same plane that was parked at
Mena. We were able to determine that it was not the same plane. We
made that determination one day when the OBN called me and asked me to
go to the Mena Airport and see if the Fat Lady was there because they
had their camouflaged C-123 in the air at that time. I went to
airport and observed the Fat Lady. Hence, two C-123's.
This information has not been freely given out, in the past, so that
many of the charletains have not been able to weave it into their
story. It has been provided to an investigative unit out of DC. For
the same reason that I can say that the Fat Lady rarely moved, I think
I can say that this other C-123 never came to Mena. I've heard the
suggestion that, maybe when the Fat Lady took off the other plane came
and sat at the same place, so nobody would know that the Fat Lady was
missing. Maybe that did happen, but it would have been so obvious,
and based on the other kinds of information that I was getting from
the airport at the same time, I can not conceive of that occuring
without me, Hadaway, and just about everybody else in the Mena area
knowing about it. At the very least, it would have been foolish for
anybody to try that and not expect to be caught at it.
The Mena airport is not out in the middle of nowhere. It's almost in
the middle of Mena. It's been my experience, since 1987, that they
don't try to be too clandestine with so called "covert activity,"
anyway. If they want to do something they'd just do it and lie about
it. It's not easy to catch a dirty cop. If you catch him in the act
of doing something, he's just going to say it was part of an ongoing
investigation; and, the chances are you're going to have a hard time
proving otherwise. You may have actually had a smoking gun, but it
gets turned around on you, and there's not much you can do about it.
While I was still investigating, I had the opportunity to go to
Southern Air Transport, in Miami. It was just a small olive green
quantset hut, sandwiched in between some larger hangers. By small I
mean "size small." If you're familiar with quantset huts, you know
what I mean. They didn't even have their own hanger.
Larry, I hope this helps. It seems like there was another question
that you asked. I'll check and get back with you. Below is part of
an email that I sent to Hopsicker, before my patience ran out with
him. I've got a great deal of my own documentation that I have never
made available. It's possible that my documentation, along with my
personal experience will help to clear up a lot of questions (and
expose some charletains). Unfortunately finding a good outlet has not
been easy. Publishers are hesitant to deal with the subject. Short
posts on the Internet seem to raise more questions than they answer;
although, I'm more than glad to answer your questions. I had hoped
that Hopsicker might provide an outlet; but, he has his own agenda.
You have my permission to post all of this.
Best Wishes,
Russ
>From '86 until the Gulf War, there annual war games stages out of
Mena,called "Coronet Centry." The army brought missile launchers,
field radar, various weapons and supplies and had a war game for a
week or two. They put all of this stuff up on peoples property around
Mena. The mayor (same one who tried to get the Cali Cartel to keep
doing business here) gave speeches about what a boost the local
economy was getting from the military.
There was some reason to believe that not all of the supplies were
returned to supply. One BATF agent asked me to help him with an
investigation of gun running at the Mena airport. He told me that he
had an informant in Little Rock who had been tested on another case.
The informant was the ex-wife of an Army Colonel. She wanted to
snitch off her husband for his part in running guns out of the Mena
Airport.
I wasn't anxious to turn up the heat on the frying pan that I was
already in, but I said that I would help. He called me three of four
times as he was preparing to start his investigation. The last time
he called me, he said that he had talked to his boss, Bill Buford, who
as far as I know still runs the Little Rock BATF office.
Bill Buford told him that he would authorize the investigation, but
warned him that several "BATF agents had lost their jobs" as a result
of the Mena Airport.
This is the only time that I have ever heard and I don't know anymore
about it. The agent said that the warning was serious enough that he
wasn't going to start his investigation. I've given this information
to certain investigative bodies out of Washington DC. It's my
understanding that they were never able to get any cooperation out the
BATF.
At the risk of getting a rumour started let me say that I think the
BATF agent I talked to was the same one killed at Waco. If it wasn't
the same one, let the BATF fork up the right agent and tell what he
knows. I raised my right hand for the DC investigators and said,"I
swear to God Almighty and put me on polygraph." If they're not getting
any cooperation from the BATF that's probably as far as it will go.
I tried to get them in touch with Bill Hobbs, a BATF agent that
retired after the Waco siege. He said that Waco was the last straw
for him. If he can remember, I feel like he will know something about
the aborted investigation. Bill Hobbs is a good man. He lives in
Tennessee.
I had information in the 80's that M-16's were available that came out
of the Mena NG Armory. The source of the M-16's was member of the NG
that worked at the armory. Later, he and a full time NG seargent were
arrest for the offense. They were also trying to sell LAWS missiles.
The arrest took place in Dequeen, about 45 miles south of Mena. They
had to take them to Fort Smith immediately to appear before a
magistrate (Federal law)so they came through Mena. There were five
marked police cars from Dequeen, with blues and sirens busting through
the red lights in Mena. It looked like the Sugarland Express. There
was no publicity and the offenders plead (pleded?) guilty to minor
charges.
There has been talk of a new east/west runway at the Mena Airport
since about 1987. Originally, it was going to be built by the
military. An army engineer unit was parachute in and build the
thing. The work would be done for free and the army would get the
training for building a combat zone airport. The early plans even had
barracks on them. This fell threw, aparently because of adverse
publicity and curious questions that local business men and
politicians attributed to me. All I could say was, "Hey, if it's
legal why did they stop just because somebody asked what they were
doing?" Later when the C-130's started coming in, a ground engineer
from Australia told me that when they came here they intended to use
the Mena Airport for some black ops, as well as, legitimate jobs.
After they got here, they found it to be such a great location that
they didn't intend to do anything except black ops. They were going
to fence in the entire airport, set up their own security, and not let
anybody in without an ID badge pinned on. These intentions were
actually placed in the local newspaper. The fence and security part
of the deal got some local publicity. About 50 feet of the fence was
actually put in at Rich Mountain Aviation. If you can remember, I
showed that to you. Hampton stated in the local newspaper that the
fence was being put in by the USG because of high level government
contracts at the Mena Airport. Hampton said he was working on top
secret stuff for the Strategic Defense Initiative (Starwars) out of
Kwagalein, in the South Pacific. Gene Wheaton called the Pentagon.
The Pentagon made an official statement that they did not put up a
fence at the Mena Airport and there were no high level contracts at
the Mena Airport. RMA had been given a small contract to do skin
maintenance on some of their airplanes that were being used in the
Marshall Islands. That stretch of fence is now a monument to Freddie
Hampton's bullshit.
The ground engineer also stated that the project, which included a new
7000' east/west runway, was going to be financed with $10 million from
a man in Washington who owned a professional ball club. When things
drug on because of me and publicity, he had to stick the money
somewhere else because of the IRS. What they were putting together
here sounds a whole lot like a military base.
The north/south runway was repaved in 1983, I've got some surveillance
photos of Seal's stuff while it was being paved. I think it's about
5,300 feet long. They have been trying to get a 7000' east/west
runway since '86 or 87'. They wanted an ILS system for the new runway
but the FAA kept turning them down because a part of the flight path
goes through a mountain near my house. A month after I was taken off
their problem list (retired) the FAA reconsidered and granted approval
to the plans. Federal money was offered for the project which is
under way right now.
Subject: Starr Targets Arkansas Law Enforcement
From: lar-jen@interaccess.com (Larry-Jennie)
Date: Mon, 19 May 1997 21:58:05 -0600
Message-ID:
Organization: InterAccess,Chicagoland's Full Service Internet Provider
Newsgroups: alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater
not to be used for commercial purposes
Starr Investigation Targets Law-Enforcement Complicity
By Jamie Dettmer and Paul M. Rodriguez
INSIGHT magazine: May 29 1995
An ongoing money-laundering probe, led by independent
counsel Kenneth W. Starr, is churning up details of possible
state and law-enforcement ties to criminal misconduct in
Arkansas.
In the late 1980s during the swirl of Iran-Contra
allegations about narcotics trafficking and weapons
shipments, senior officer in the Arkansas State Police began
a methodical operation to destroy sensitive documents
linking some of the state's most prominent political and
business figures to illegal activities - spin-offs from
Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North's cover arms for hostages
deals.
Arkansas connection to Iran-Contra were, at the time,
obscured nationally. Attention was riveted on Washington,
Ronald Reagan and North's manic shredding of files detailing
the "enterprise" that provided arms for the release of
American hostages in the Middle East and guns for the
Nicaraguan Contras. Arkansas seemed a long way from the
action in the nation's capital.
Until Bill Clinton ran for president, an Arkansas dimension
to Iran-Contra remained ignored by mainstream news
organizations and federal officials. Now though, what in
the 1980s has moved to center stage. It's not just shady
land deals surfacing, but widespread wrongdoing by the state
politico-business establishment that behaved as though it
was above the law - and with the help of police officers,
was allowed to be.
The conspiracy theorist, of course, have run riot and
attempted to pin all the blame for misdeeds in Arkansas on
Clinton. But what slowly is unfolding is a far more
complicated story of negligence, opportunism and rank
exploitation by a one-party political system that bent the
rules and turned a blind eye to alleged criminal activity
when it was carried out by some of its own.
Enter KWS. As the independent counsel pursues the money
trail of Clinton and his wife, Hillary, in a land deal
called Whitewater, the inner workings of Arkansas government
and law enforcement are coming under the spotlight. What
KWS is finding, according to a former senior federal
official familiar with the probe, is a good-ole-boy network
of "corruption and obstruction" in a state seemingly awash
in narcotics money - some almost certainly of Iran-Contra
origin and some from more home-grown enterprises.
INSIGHT now has learned that Starr's team of more than 125
FBI and IRS agents and U.S. attorneys are investigating what
appears, on the surface, to be unrelated aspects of the
Whitewater deal. His investigators are delving heavily into
Arkansas narcotics and homicide cases, some of which have
remained unsolved for years. And what is being uncovered,
according to federal and state officials who agreed to be
interviewed, is layer upon layer of complicity by state and
local law-enforcement agencies and a maze of allegations
that has investigators widening their inquiries at every
turn.
One of the most startling discoveries so far is an extensive
and regular pattern of document shredding in the late 1980s
on the orders of senior state police officials. According
to law-enforcement sources in Little Rock, the shredded
documents were federal and state intelligence records and
police investigators' files on prominent Arkansans. Some,
such as businessman Dan Lasater, were significant
contributors to Clinton's gubernatorial campaigns. Also
shredded was material on the murky drug-running and arms-
smuggling operation based at the Mena Intermountain Regional
Airport (see INSIGHT, Jan. 30, 1995).
The shredding, which was conducted in a tiny office in the
office in the state police headquarters, was furtive and
known only by a handful of officers at the highest levels in
the Arkansas State Police - that is, until Starr's
investigator (missing) nessmen with close ties to Clinton
personally. The destruction of documents was at its most
intense in 1988 and 1989.
Col. Tommy Goodwin, former Arkansas State Police commander,
says, "I am not aware of any documents that were shredded."
Former state troopers, who in the 1980s attempted to
investigate prominent Arkansas allegedly involved in the
cocaine parties and drug sales, are not surprised by the
disclosures of the shredding. Julius "Doc" Delaughter claims
he resigned from the state police in 1988 after his
superiors blocked the mounting of certain inquiries. He
recalls how documents concerning other cases, such as the
Lasater investigation, would turn up missing. "A deposition
I took from a friend of Lasater was stolen off my desk and
was never seen again," says Delaughter.
The deposition Delaughter says he secured could have proved
embarrassing for then-Gov. Clinton if it had been leaked.
It dealt with a cocaine party allegedly organized by Lasater
in Hot Springs, Ark., hotel suite. The party hastily ended
with the arrival of Clinton, who was scheduled to meet with
Lasater. Lasater subsequently was convicted of cocaine
distribution and sentenced to prison.
In another case, a state police captain was apparently so
concerned by the regular destruction of potentially
embarrassing material that he maintained for safekeeping a
copy of a lengthy memorandum revealing that a Mena-based
drug-running suspect was allowed to consult investigators'
telephone records with the knowledge of Goodwin, who retired
last June. According to the memo, a copy of which INSIGHT
has obtained, the suspect a former state narcotics officer,
learned from his search of the phone logs that state trooper
were cooperating with the FBI agents on a probe of Barry
Seal, a notorious, confessed drug trafficker who claimed,
before his assassination in 1986 at the hands of Colombian
hit men, to have been part of North's Iran-Contra
operations.
The 10-page memo provides a revealing look into the close-
knit world of Arkansas law enforcement. Written on Jan. 9,
1987, by Lt. Doug Williams (now a captain), the memo, which
was sent to his superior officer, Capt. Doug Stevens,
related how the suspect requested help in learning the
nature of the investigations being mounted at Mena airport
and into himself and his associates.
The suspect complained to Williams that the "local sheriff's
office had started watching the airport." He mentioned he
had visited a senior state police officer, Maj. Richard
Rail, "which he did often," and that they had talked about
how investigators charged long-distance calls to state
credit cards. According to the Williams memo: "He [the
suspect] stated that he took most of the day at the capitol
building checking these [telephone] records and that the
gentleman that was helping him there told him he could not
copy these records; however, he could sit down with the
records and make hand notes from them and that Colonel
Goodwin had been advised of his being there and periodically
checked back to see if he was still there and each time the
colonel checked back, the man would walk in and say Mr.
Goodwin just called back to see if you were still here and
how you were doing."
Rules governing public access to state police phone records
and credit cards should have restrained the suspect.
According to Wayne Jordan, a spokesman for the Arkansas
State Police, records connected with active intelligence
operations and ongoing probes are strictly off-limits. Only
when cases are closed, according to Jordan, are records
available for public inspection; then any inspection
requires a Freedom of Information Act request and approval
by the head of the Arkansas State Police.
The complex events surrounding Mena-the clandestine flights
of guns and drugs in the dead of night; the peculiar
stifling of local investigations as well as probes mounted
by federal and even less to do with
Clinton. But Starr's investigators seem to be convinced,
based on their questions to witnesses and requests for
documents, that the flow of drug profits and the alleged
diversion of that money into businesses in Arkansas and even
into Clinton's campaign finances warrant major
investigation.
In his bid to trace donations to the then governor's
election coffers, the independent counsel's FBI agents have
reviewed thousands of pages of case files connected to
suspected narcotics operations and money laundering by
reputed criminals in Arkansas and surrounding jurisdictions.
Starr's investigators also begun question the Mena pilots
responsible for air-dropping sturdy duffel bags full of
Central American cocaine and cash at pre-arranged sites in
Arkansas.
"The Feds are primarily interested in money-laundering
activities," says Joe Evans, one of the pilots interrogated
recently. "The questioning had to do with where the money
was coming from, where the money was going. They asked me
from which banks in the U.S. or internationally the money
originated. They asked me how frequent were the flights and
how large were the shipments."
During the interview with Evans, Starr's investigators also
were interested in a mysterious and as-yet-unsolved double
homicide near Little Rock in 1987 that has been the subject
of considerable local controversy. Again, it is money
laundering that seems to be foremost in the minds of Starr's
investigators as they review the cold-case files concerning
the murders of teenagers Don Henry and Kevin Ives, who were
found stabbed and bludgeoned on railroad tracks along the
Pulaski-Saline county line on the outskirts of Little Rock.
INSIGHT has learned that the double homicide also is the
subject of a separate FBI investigation and that a grand
jury has been impaneled in Little Rock to take testimony in
the case. The targets of that investigation, according to
sources, are a handful of suspected drug dealers from
northwest Arkansas, a Little Rock prosecutor and several
former members of the sheriff's departments in Pulaski and
Saline counties. Two of the alleged drug dealers under
suspicion in the murders were mentioned regularly in
Arkansas State Police intelligence files, copies of which
INSIGHT has obtained, contain raw and unsubstantiated
allegations about wrongdoing by a number of prominent
businessmen in Arkansas.
There have been many theories put forth to explain the
murders of Henry and Ives. A persistent one argues that the
teenagers stumbled upon a Mena narcotics drop site shortly
before drugs were due to be unloaded. This theory appears
to have caught the attention of Starr's team. Mena pilots
have been asked about a drop site code-named "A-12" by the
smugglers. They also have been asked about "Flight 50" -
all Mena flights were numbered - which coincided with the
date and time of the boys' deaths.
Starr's investigators have interviewed several convicted
drug offenders in Arkansas prisons who are believed to be
connected to the homicides of Henry and Ives.
Current and former members of Congress and law-enforcement
officers who have looked into the Mena drug and money-
laundering operations long have suspected that there was -
and continues to be - complicity by people at both the state
and federal levels to keep a lid on the events in Arkansas
during the 1980s and early 1990s. They believe that what
began under the guise of national security involving Iran-
Contra blossomed into an extensive, tangled conspiracy to
hide the links between Mena and nonfederal corruption
through out the region.
"Starr should be investigating the Arkansas police," says a
former high ranking federal official who worked behind the
scenes to put together pieces of the Mena puzzle. "What is
coming to light now is that there was a broad-based
conspiracy to hide the truth drug
conspiracies and the latest turns in the Starr inquiry.
"I could never understand why no one went down this path
before," says Bill Duncan, a former IRS agent and
congressional investigator who for three years tried to
secure indictments in connection with Mena drug smuggling.
In a confidential memorandum to House Judiciary subcommittee
on crime dated Oct. 8, 1991, Duncan wrote: "On this date I
received a telephone call from Paul Whitmore concerning a
conversation which he had just overheard at the El Paso
Intelligence Center. Whitmore related that, just minutes
ago, he heard the Central Intelligence Agency EPIC Resident
Agent tell the U.S. Customs EPIC Resident Agent that the CIA
still has ongoing operations out of the Mena, Ark., Airport,
but that 'some other guys' are still operating out of the
airport also, and that one of the operations at the airport
is laundering money." Whitmore was the IRS agent stationed
at EPIC, formally called the El Paso Intelligence agencies.
Duncan's memo concluded: "The CIA agent then told the
Customs Agent that if the laundering of cash was a par of
Customs Operations, he wasn't going to worry about it.
According to Whitmore, they also discussed checking the
registration of various aircraft which are currently at the
Mena, Ark., Airport."
For Duncan, the memo is just one more piece of evidence
pointing to "a bizarre mixture of drug smuggling, gun
running and money laundering."
[Three photos accompany the article.
1. Photo of Goodwin.
2. Photo of a C-123 cargo plane at Mena.
3. Photos of Henry and Ives.
INSIGHT is a weekly news magazine published by
Washington Times Corp
Subject: MENA REDACTIONS: Rich Mountain & Fred Hampton
From: lar-jen@interaccess.com (Larry-Jennie)
Date: Sat, 24 May 1997 11:07:50 -0600
Message-ID:
Organization: InterAccess,Chicagoland's Full Service Internet Provider
Newsgroups: alt.politics.org.fbi,alt.conspiracy,alt.impeach.clinton,
alt.president.clinton,alt.politics.clinton,alt.politics.bush,
alt.current-events.arkansas.mena,alt.politics.corruption.mena,
alt.politics.usa.republican
Note the deletions in this sworn deposition about Mena cocaine
trafficking:
Excerpt from:
In December 1996, the Portland Free Press secured a copy of Richard
Brenneke's 21 June 1991 sworn deposition before Congressman William
Alexander, Jr., and Chad Farris, chief deputy attorney general of
Arkansas. Mr. Alexander did the direct questioning and Bushman Court
Reporting, Inc., did the recording.
Q. And when you landed at Mena, what would be the disposition of the
cargo?
A. On one or two occasions the cargo was taken off by people who were
not residents of the Mena area and put into other aircraft which
departed from there. However, the most frequent activity was that the
aircraft would be unloaded in front of [deleted]'s hangers and it would
be stored in the back of the hanger....
Q. And go back in your mind to the first trip you took and describe to
me the disposition of the cargo; that is, the cocaine, once it returned
to Arkansas, once it was delivered to Arkansas? And I am especially I
am particularly interested in the identification of persons other than
[deleted]. You've talked about [deleted]. You've identified him. Can
you identify other people who might have received this cocaine?
(He talks about Gotti and the New York Mob.)
***
Excerpt from:
"Truth on Mena, Seal shrouded in shady allegations
Drug smuggling rumors just won't die"
By Michael Arbanas
THE ARKANSAS GAZETTE
December 22, 1990
A similar tale, though in a broader setting, is told by Richard
Brenneke, a Portland, Ore., businessman who claims a history as a CIA
contractor and whose name has come up several times during the
Iran-Contra investigations.
Brenneke said in an August interview with Duncan, who is now
pursuing the investigation as a private citizen, that he flew as many
as six shipments into the Mena airport from Panama from 1983 to 1986
as part of a CIA-sponsored effort to supply the Contras.
He laundered money for the operation, Brenneke said, and ferried
Latin Americans, mostly Panamanian Defense Forces, to Mena for
training in the Ouachita National Forest.
Brenneke said he got his instructions from CIA contacts and
carried several groups of 10 to 40 Latin Americans for training,
dropping them off in their civilian clothes at Rich Mountain. He
said he had made three or four trips to the Nella airstrip.
He met Seal once at the airport, he said, but Seal was not part
of the same operation as far as he could tell. He also claimed to
have seen an associate of John Gotti, the reputed New York mobster,
at the airport, saying he knew the man from earlier money-laundering
operations.
Brenneke is not one of the Bush administration's favorite
people, and officials have loudly attacked his credibility. He has,
though, shown himself on occasion to know more about the
international arms trade than the average real estate property
manager.
He first drew media attention in November 1986, when The New
York Times reported that he had written a series of memos to the
United States government in late 1985 and early 1986 asking to get in
on a deal to sell arms to Iran. The story hit the newsstands just
days after Attorney General Edwin Meese said on national television
that only a few top administration figures and private consultants
knew about the deal.
This year, Brenneke was acquitted of five counts of perjury. He
was charged with lying in 1988 when he told a federal judge that he
had participated in 1980 meetings in Paris in which Reagan campaign
officials cut a deal with Iran to postpone the release of the 52
American hostages in the American Embassy in Tehran until after
Reagan won his election challenging President Jimmy Carter.
Paramilitary reports
Reed's and Brenneke's accounts don't seem too far-fetched to
Welch, who said state police and local sheriff's offices got regular
reports of automatic weapons fire, low-flying planes and small groups
of uniformed men crossing streams and roads in the National Forest.
"There was talk of paramilitary activity in the forest between
the Nella community and Lake Ouachita," Welch said. "We thought
maybe it was somebody like the CSA (the Covenant, the Sword, and the
Arm of the Lord, a white supremacist paramilitary group that operated
in Northern Arkansas during that era)."
***
From: "Bear Bottoms"
To: "The ciadrugs mailing list"
Cc: "cas list"
Subject: ciadrugs] Re: Black Eagle?
Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 17:41:00 -0500
I have a unredacted version. Implant Fred Hampton and Rich Mountain
aviation in the redacted area.
***
What National Security roles or secrets were being protected when
"Rich Mountain" and "Fred Hampton" were blacked out in the sworn
deposition?
Note how the deposition was released only this past December,
so the National Security redaction justification remained active.
Larry
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
$$ $$
$$ The CIA cocaine smuggling on behalf of the Contras $$
$$ through Mena, Arkansas corrupted the Presidencies $$
$$ of Bill Clinton, George Bush and Ronald Reagan. $$
$$ For details, see: $$
$$ ftp://pencil.cs.missouri.edu/pub/mena/ $$
$$ $$
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Subject: The Heart of the Octopus
From: wmcguire@cybercom.net (Wayne McGuire)
Date: Wed, 28 May 1997 07:27:52 GMT
Message-ID: <33b2dc6c.138891473@news.harvardnet.com>
Organization: Kersur Technologies
Newsgroups: alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater
Randolph,
My ISP lately has been failing to receive a
goodly number of important posts in this
newsgroup.
I discovered your post below, which is
excellent, on Alta Vista.
A brief comment: I think this information
is getting exceedingly close to the heart
of the Octopus, which involves a criminal
conspiracy between the Mossad and a
corrupted wing of the CIA.
The conspiracy perhaps began with
the October Surprise, continued with
Iran-Contra and Mena, and is alive and
well in dominating pockets of the
Clinton administration.
It is not a shock that Chinagate
has the look and feel of Iran-Contra;
the same political forces are
probably at work in the current
scandal.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the
uncorrupted wing of the American
national security and intelligence
communities begin to take on this
problem in a truly serious way in
the near future.
My source on Amiram Nir's
involvement in Mena is Terry
Reed's "Compromised."
--- BEGIN ---
Re: Foster & Mena & JQP Distorts
From Randolph Langley
Organization Florida State University
Date 26 May 1997 04:46:10 -0400
Newsgroups alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater
Message-ID
wmcguire@cybercom.net (Wayne McGuire) writes:
>
> jqp@globaldialog.com wrote:
>
> >Wayne McGuire wrote:
> >>
> >> jqp@globaldialog.com wrote:
> >>
> >> >Larry-Jennie wrote:
> >> >>
> >> >> In article <3388493F.7D2E@globaldialog.com> jqp@globaldialog.com writes:
> >> >>
> >> >> >Larry-Jennie wrote:
> >> >> >>
> >> >> >> In article <5m8lfe$76q@sjx-ixn6.ix.netcom.com> jmoore3@ix.netcom.com(John
> >> >> >Moore ) writes:
> >> >> >>
> >> >> >> >You're being stupid JQP. Tossing away evidence without justification
> >> >> >> >other than personal whim is arrogant and stupid.
> >> >>
> >> >> Larry-Jennie wrote:
> >> >> >> JQP does that all the time.
> >> >> >>
> >> >> >> He claims no cocaine came into Mena via Barry Seal's organization.
> >> >>
> >> >> John Q. Public wrote:
> >> >> >Trying to drag another thread off topic, Lar?
> >> >>
> >> >> No. I was pointing to another example how John Q. Public tries to
> >> >> control discussion through distortion and bullying. He has to semar
> >> >> since he can't argue the evidence and testimony.
> >> >>
> >> >> Also, there is a linkage between Vince Foster and Mena.
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >Trying to drag another thread off topic, Larry?
> >> >
> >> >This one used to be about Foster and CW, until you showed up.
> >>
> >> I think you and Martin McPhillips are
> >> part of the same campaign that harassed
> >> Patrick Knowlton and entrapped Chuck
> >> Hayes. I think you are here to bury the
> >> truth, not to expose it. I think you in
> >> particular are especially nervous about
> >> Mena because Israel was involved in the
> >> operation and related operations.
> >
> >Looky here! Wayne's wading in on Mena, and
> >guess what? He says it was *the Jews*!
>
> No, I am saying the terrorism adviser
> for Menachem Begin, Amiram Nir, was
> involved in Mena. That means that the
> Israeli government was heavily involved
> in Mena, and probably in every other
> illegal operation run by the Reagan
> administration and CIA director Bill
> Casey.
Nir? What's your source on that? That would be a most interesting
connection. Nir was a principal in the whole Iran-Contra mess; the
book "By Way of Deception"[*] has a most interesting few pages
[327-331] on this, which by the oddest chance I was reading today.
Speaking of books, the book "Dangerous Liaison"[**] does indeed place
the Israelis front and center in Oliver North's drug and gun running
schemes, although Nir is not specifically mentioned. Mike Harari is
prominent, however. On pages 254 and 255 the Cockburns write:
[ed: Quoting Blandon] "Harari was part of a powerful network, a more
complete network --- the Israelis. The most important country to
supply arms to Central America between 1980 and 1983, especially in
Guatemala and El Salvador, was Israel. From 1983 to 1985, the most
important network to supply arms to the contras was this [ed:
Harari's] network." The Israeli arms conduit preceded the host of
U.S. operatives who later flooded the region, airlifting arms until
one of their planes was shot down over Nicaragua in October 1986, thus
exposing the operation. But there was reluctance on Capitol Hill to go
into precisely what Israel had contributed. With literally hundreds of
tons of captured weapons from PLO stocks shipped at the request of
Casey, with seasoned Israeli military trainers like Emil Sa'ada and
Amatzia Shuali in the field, and with the Panamanian operation run by
Mike Harari, the contribution was substantial.
There was, however, a rather delicate problem with the Harari
arrangement: his reported involvement in the cocaine trade. According
to Blandon, "Harari was part of the Noriega business. They moved the
cocaine from Colombia to Panama." From there the former intelligence
adviser explained, the product was transshipped to "airstrips in Costa
Rica or Honduras and on to the United States. Since the beginning of
the supply of arms to the contras, the same infrastructure that was
used for arms was used for drugs. The same pilots, the same planes,
the same airstrips, the same people." As the former Panamanian consul
general saw it, the cartel used Noriega's involvement with the contras
to gain access to the facilities of the cover war while "Noriega used
the connections that Harari had in Israel and they put together a
complete business."
When asked whether the CIA knew of the dark side of Harari's
business dealings, Blandon stated that the agency had known of
Noriega's involvement with the Colombian cartels since 1980 and
that "since 1980, Israel has supplied arms in Central America... and
the relationship between Israel and the United States in terms of
these things is so close that I don't believe the United States
didn't know about that." The United States certainly did know
that some of the arms destined for the contras were purchased with drug
money. That was made very clear in the diaries of Oliver North.
This goes on in the same vein, exploring interconnects between Israel
and the CIA in the Iran-Contra affair. While Nir (apparently) did not
survive this whole contretemps [B.W.O.D., pages 328-329], Harari
retired to Israel and built "an impressive house in a posh enclave
outside Tel Aviv." [D.L., page 259].
Oh well. Who says crime doesn't pay? Certainly not the Clintonites,
or Mike Harari.
rdl
[*] "By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer"
by Victor Ostrovsky and Claire Hoy. ISBN is 0-312-05613-3.
[**] "Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert
Relationship" by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn. ISBN is 0-06-016444-1.
--- END ---
--
Wayne McGuire
http://www.cybercom.net/~wmcguire
Subject: Welch: "No feather in my cap"
From: lar-jen@interaccess.com (Larry-Jennie)
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 1997 21:04:30 -0600
Message-ID:
Organization: InterAccess,Chicagoland's Full Service Internet Provider
Newsgroups: alt.politics.org.cia
Date: Mon, 09 Jun 1997 13:08:30 -0500
From: Russell Welch
To: ciadrugs@mars.galstar.com
Subject: ciadrugs] No feather in my cap
Let me say that I do not intend to be a life long member of this mailing
list. Reliving my history in short episodes tends to be a little
painful; however, some things seem to be clearer looking back on them
than they were at the time they occurred. I find it alluring that a
group of people are interested in a piece of American history of which I
had some participation. I believe that somewhere in the dialogue that
Billy Bottoms and I have shared, the members of this group have gotten a
glimpse of what Barry Seal was about. Bottoms and I don't agree on
everything; but, we have learned from each other. One thing I learned
from a career in law enforcement is that history is very fragile. If
two people can't agree on what they both saw yesterday, what happens to
"facts" after a year, or ten years, or a hundred years? Every time I
started an investigation I initiated a journal where I kept my "field
notes." Most of the time my field notes were kept in a spiral notebook.
This would protect the integrity of my field notes by making it
impossible to remove a page without it being noticed. I always tried to
make my entries immediately after the event. If, per chance, a couple
of days went by before I made the entry, I would make a note that time
had passed between the event and the entry. A part of my goal was to
accept accountability for every thing that I did, right or wrong. I
doubt that I ever worked a case where I didn't make some kind of an
error or mis-judgement. My court testimony was based on documents in my
case file, including my field notes. Occasionally, I found that my
memory of an event did not match my notes. My field notes could always
take me back to what I was thinking when I wrote them. The notes were
intended to be an objective record for both the suspect and the
prosecuting attorney. I never assumed the roll of a cop who just tried
to put people in prison. I followed the evidence and made my findings
available to defense attorneys as well as prosecuting attorneys. My
solution rate was very high but I never got a "feather in my cap." I
never expected one. I was nominated for Trooper of the Year for my Rich
Mountain Aviation investigation but I didn't get it. Instead they gave
me an official commendation for catching a serial killer. I always let
somebody else take the credit - sheriff, chief of police, my supervisor,
etc.. Life was easier if these people didn't think I was trying to steal
their thunder. Daniel Hopsicker chose to make a public statement that I
am egotistical. That statement could not be further from the truth. If
I was trying to feed my ego I would have been a lot more public. I do
want to make it clear that I do not have any patience with people who
play with the truth for their own gain. I've seen facts from my case
file twisted by charlatans. Several people have obtained documents from
my case file and sold them to various news agencies or other interests
that were willing to pay. Over a year ago, investigators from Leach's
banking committee wanted to share some documents with me and get my
response. I was able to show them my markings on the documents. The
documents had been taken from my case file. Who ever gave these
documents to the banking committee just lost all of their integrity.
Leach and Starr have both said they were having trouble investigation
some allegations because so many of their sources were not credible.
Anyway, the reason I started this letter was to respond to a couple of
statements by Billy Bottoms.
First, I had a very strong case put together against both Freddie
Hampton and Joe Evans; but, the strongest case was actually on Joe Evans
because he had more hands-on involvement with Seal and I could put him
with Seal before he move to the Mena Airport. Joe Evans and his wife
forged signatures on the fuel truck to establish their fictitious
business, "H&L Explorations." I think Joe used the fictitious name,
"Bill Elder." If you remember, Billy, this is also the fictitious name
that Barry frequently used while in Mena. Reed didn't seem to have that
information when he wrote Compromised.
I don't think Billy Bottoms and I are going to be able to agree
concerning who was protected by Barry's plea agreement. The fact that
it didn't end up on paper is a good indication to me that it wasn't a
part of the final terms. I, also, feel certain that Barry would have
mentioned it when Duncan and I interviewed him. Jacobson and Joura
never mentioned it in their depositions, either.
I want to take exception with Billy's statement that officers in
Arkansas were trying to get a feather in their cap. Maybe cap feathers
are a noble reward in some places, but the most I could ever hope for
was to just break even. Duncan and I were the only ones investigating
in Arkansas. FBI agent Tom Ross showed up occasionally, but he wasn't
investigating. I don't know what he was doing. I couldn't drop an
investigation just because I wanted to go and do something else. I did
not start the investigation of Rich Mountain Aviation because I was
looking for glory. That case was assigned to me by Colonel Tommy
Goodwin. It was what we called a "target file." These types of
investigations could only be initiated by the Director of the State
Police. The Director issued the case file number, which was designated
with a "T." The Rich Mountain Aviation target file number was "T-57,"
meaning that this was the 57th target file assigned by the Director.
Prior to that, T-18 had been a catch-all file for dope activity at the
Mena Airport.
Barry Seal was killed on Feb. 19, 1986. For awhile I wandered if there
was something significant about the month of February. Emile Camp was
killed on Feb. 20, 1985. Eric Arthur was killed on Feb. 17, 1984, when
he "accidentally" walked into the prop of his own plane. Billy, you
can't blame a cop for being just a little bit suspicious when he finds
out that the same day Arthur walked into the prop, Barry lost $950,000
in gold Krugerands. Duncan and I actually speculated that February of
1987 would be your month. The investigation of Rich Mountain Aviation
lingered on into 1988. I never ran out of leads but I got very tired
and there were other cases to work. I had to go undercover on another
smuggler at Mena. This one is still in prison. I had some demanding
homicides that I had to tend to. I had another undercover case going
between Dallas and Hot Springs. Things go on.
In 1987, however, some new players came to the airport that did not have
anything to do with Seal. By then, Barry Seal was ancient history; but,
Rich Mountain Aviation and the Mena Airport was going strong. What
happened after that didn't bare any resemblance to Barry Seal's
operation. After that you could go to the airport and hear people
talking about the State Department, C-130's in Africa and Miami and
Australia. Men dressed in El Salvadorian military uniforms were
frequently seen at a local motel. Arabs in native dress were commonly
seen at the airport, and so on. Some of these new people talked about
their activity with Oliver North's deal at Southern Air Transport. It
was after 1987 that I started having trouble with the Arkansas State
Police for drug investigations that I was doing at the Mena Airport. It
was in 1987 that the assistant director of the ASP allowed the business
manager from Rich Mountain Aviation to look through my investigative
files - files for which Rich Mountain Aviation was the target. This is
when uniformed State Police officers were coming to the airport and
visiting with known smugglers. This is when my supervisors began giving
me direct orders to stop drug investigations at the airport. This is
when drug evidence, that I had sent to the lab for trace testing, was
returned to me, untested. Things continued to get worse. In 1991, I was
poisoned. The envelopes that carried the poison were sent to me from
State Police headquarters in Hope, Arkansas. I'll leave it at that.
Billy Bottoms is right. You win a few, you lose a few. That's no reason
to quit my job with the state police. Barry Seal had nothing to do with
my separation from the Arkansas State Police. Barry Seal was a piece of
cake compared to what came after him.
Russell Welch
Subject: Dennis Byrne: Conrad Black's DuPage Dupe Columnist
From: Tom Deflumere
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 1997 17:18:20 -0500
Message-ID:
Organization: EnterAct L.L.C. Turbo-Elite News Server
Newsgroups: chi.media
From: lar+jen@interaccess.com (Larry + Jennie)
Subject: WALL STREET JOURNAL on CIA Cocaine, 4/22/87
Keywords: CIA, cocaine, Ronald Reagan, Oliver North, Eugene Hasenfus, Barry Sea
l, Mena, Drug Enforcement Administration, George Bush, Pablo Escobar, Humberto
Ortega
Here is the JOURNAL's first report on the CIA-connected cocaine
trafficking through Mena, Arkansas.
"U.S. officials have rejected accusations of major drug
trafficking by the Contras. The handling of those accusations
now is being reviewed by two congressional committees and the
independent counsel for the Iran-Contra affair." Too bad one
of those congressional committees and the independent counsel
totally ignored the evidence given to them regarding CIA cocaine
trafficking. The chariman of the other congressional committee,
Sen. John Kerry, was plagued with charges of being a Communist
sympathizer.
"The imprisoned drug pilots say Mr. Seal was involved in
flights that brought weapons to Central American airfields
for the Contras and sometimes returned to the U.S. with
drugs. The pilots claim that their Contra weapons deliveries
were directed by the CIA. The people they say they worked
with are known to have been supervised or monitored by the
CIA and by Lt. Col. Oliver North, the National Security
Council staffer fired for his role in the program to sell
arms to Iran and fund the Contras. As is its practice, the
Central Intelligence Agency refuses to comment."
Who knows? Had the Select Committee on Iran-contra asked Ollie
North the questions that this report prompts, then the USA
probably would never have had a President William Jefferson Clinton.
Note that George Bush's office was made aware of Barry Seal's
drug trafficking expertise.
Larry
_____________
Headline:
"Dope Story:
Doubts Rise on Report
Reagan Cited in Tying
Sandinistas to Cocaine
---
Little Evidence Backs Tale,
Which Came From Pilot
Who Claimed CIA Link
---
Deal for a Lighter Sentence"
---
By Jonathan Kwitny
WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 22, 1987
In the early-morning darkness of June 26, 1984, Adler
Barriman Seal, a wealthy, convicted drug smuggler working as
a federal informant in hopes of leniency, landed his C-123
cargo plane at Homestead Air Force Base near Miami. On board
was 1,500 pounds of cocaine he said he had brought from
Nicaragua.
Within a few weeks, unnamed "administration officials,"
citing information provided by Mr. Seal, leaked to the press
stories saying that top Nicaraguan leaders, including a
brother of President Daniel Ortega, were trafficking in
cocaine with the help of Soviets and Cubans.
The Reagan administration has used the Seal story -- which
Nicaragua denies -- ever since in attempts to rouse
congressional and public support for aid to the Contra rebels
fighting to overthrow Mr. Ortega's Sandinista government. On
March 16 of last year, in an appeal for a Contra aid package,
President Reagan displayed on national television a photo
taken by a camera hidden in Mr. Seal's plane.
"I know that every American parent concerned about the
drug problem will be outraged to learn that top Nicaraguan
government officials are deeply involved in drug
trafficking," Mr. Reagan said. "This picture, secretly taken
at a military airfield outside Managua, shows Federico
Vaughan, a top aide to one of the nine commandants who rule
Nicaragua, loading an aircraft with illegal narcotics bound
for the United States."
But Mr. Seal's evidence of Nicaraguan drug trafficking
doesn't appear to be as sweeping as he or the Reagan
administration portrayed it.
The Drug Enforcement Administration says the cocaine on
Mr. Seal's C-123 is the only drug shipment by way of
Nicaragua that it knows of -- and Mr. Seal said he had
brought it there to begin with. The Nicaraguan "military
airfield" that officials said Mr. Seal flew from is in fact a
civilian field used chiefly for crop-dusting flights, the
State Department now concedes. That concession undermines the
basis for linking Defense Minister Humberto Ortega, President
Ortega's brother, to the operation.
In fact, the man who supervised Mr. Seal's work for the
government -- Richard Gregorie, chief assistant U.S. attorney
in Miami -- says he could find no information beyond Mr.
Seal's word tying any Nicaraguan official to the drug
shipment. As for Federico Vaughan, the man Mr. Reagan called
an aide to a Sandinista commandant, federal prosecutors and
drug officials now say they aren't sure who he is.
Asked about the matter, a White House spokesman says, "We
got the information from DEA and have received no indication
from them of any change in their original assessment."
Meanwhile, some DEA officials complain that the
administration's use of Mr. Seal's story against the
Sandinistas sabotaged a much bigger drug case, against
Colombians.
Now there are allegations that besides drugs, Mr. Seal may
have been involved with other sensitive cargo. Four drug
pilots in prison in Florida say they knew Mr. Seal as part of
a network that delivered weapons to airfields in Central
America for the American-backed Contras and then sometimes
flew back to the U.S. with cocaine. Over the years, Mr. Seal
told associates and testified in court that he sometimes did
work for Central Intelligence Agency operations. Though the
Justice Department was quick to follow up Mr. Seal's
Nicaraguan story with an indictment, it rejected allegations
from the pilots and others of drug dealing by Contras.
The Seal case is a complex double helix of politics and
law enforcement. Mr. Seal provided his story about Nicaragua
after contacting Vice President George Bush's anti-drug task
force and offering to be an informant. He gave the
administration the photographs and testimony it used to
accuse Nicaraguan leaders of drug trafficking. In return,
federal prosecutors helped him wriggle out of a long prison
term he faced on three drug convictions. He got six months'
probation.
Doubts about portions of his story first were raised last
year in the Village Voice and Columbia Journalism Review by
Joel Millman, who helped locate sources for this broader
investigation of the case.
It is clear Mr. Seal was a major drug runner. He had a
fleet of at least four planes, and he testified in federal
court that he earned more than $50 million smuggling dope. He
said he made $600,000 or $700,000 while working for the DEA
in the Nicaraguan case, which the government says it let him
keep to cover expenses.
The money did him little good. On Feb. 19, 1986, as Mr.
Seal was getting out of his white Cadillac at a Louisiana
shelter where his probation required him to spend nights, a
squad of hit men gunned him down.
When Mr. Seal first faced various drug charges several
years ago, he initially got nowhere in seeking a deal. He
twice went to Justice Department and DEA officials in Florida
seeking a milder sentence in exchange for doing undercover
work to catch big Colombian drug-cartel leaders, and he made
the same offer in another federal drug case in Louisiana. The
prosecutors all decided they preferred to have Mr. Seal in
jail.
So in March of 1984 he called Mr. Bush's drug task force,
got an appointment and flew his Learjet to Washington, he
explained later in testimony at drug trials of others in
federal court in Miami and Las Vegas. Two task-force staffers
say they met Mr. Seal on a Washington street and escorted him
to a meeting with Kenneth R. Kennedy, a veteran DEA agent.
The Justice Department says that he was accepted as an
informant to trap Colombian dealers and that everyone was
surprised to learn later of a Nicaraguan connection. But Mr.
Kennedy recalls Mr. Seal's saying at their first meeting that
"the officials of the Nicaraguan government are involved in
smuggling cocaine into the United States, specifically the
Sandinistas; that he would go through Nicaragua and get loads
and bring them back; that he had brought loads of cocaine
{through Nicaragua} in the past and he could continue to do
it."
Thomas Sclafani, who was just becoming Mr. Seal's lawyer
in Miami at the time, says that he is "absolutely" sure that
nailing Nicaraguans was "a key ingredient" in the deal Mr.
Seal offered the government.
Mr. Kennedy sent Mr. Seal to agents Robert Joura and
Ernest Jacobsen in the DEA's Miami office. They authorized
him to go to Colombia and Panama to arrange a drug shipment,
but they say it was a total surprise when he returned with
news that cocaine-cartel leaders were moving their operations
to Nicaragua because of law-enforcement pressure in Colombia.
Mr. Seal testified that the cocaine leaders explained to him,
"We are not communists. We don't particularly enjoy the same
philosophy politically that they do. But they serve our means
and we serve theirs."
Mr. Gregorie, the federal prosecutor in Miami, says the
politics of it made no difference to him, either. "Nobody
cared," he says. Nicaragua "was just another place they {the
cocaine cartel} did business."
As Mr. Seal related the story in his testimony, it was in
Panama in mid-May 1984 that the Colombians introduced Mr.
Vaughan to him as "some sort of a government official from
Nicaragua." He said Mr. Vaughan claimed to be a top aide to
Tomas Borge, the Sandinista interior minister and
security-police chief.
Mr. Seal testified that Mr. Vaughan took him and a
co-pilot to Nicaragua on an airliner, dodging customs at the
airport, and that they stayed at Mr. Vaughan's house
overnight. Then, he said, a Nicaraguan military driver gave
them a tour of an airfield and Mr. Vaughan pointed out
antiaircraft batteries they should avoid, before putting them
on a flight to Panama. As evidence of the trip, he offered
his boarding pass on an airliner to Managua and a receipt for
payment of the Managua airport tax; neither document appears
to bear any date or name identification.
On his first scheduled drug run after becoming an
informant, Mr. Seal testified, his plane skidded off a muddy
Colombian airstrip and crashed as he was taking off. He said
the accident forced the cocaine shipment onto a smaller plane
that needed to refuel to reach the U.S.; the refueling stop
was in Nicaragua, he said, and Mr. Vaughan met the flight. As
he related it, after taking off again, his plane was hit with
anti-aircraft fire and limped into the main Managua airport,
where he and his co-pilot were held by military officers.
Eventually, Mr. Seal testified, Mr. Vaughan's military
driver brought a truck to the Managua airport, transferred
the cocaine off the plane and drove it away. He said he was
jailed overnight, then picked up by Mr. Vaughan and given a
small plane to fly home to the U.S., leaving the cocaine in
Nicaragua. He said this plane was owned by Pablo Escobar, who
the DEA says is a major partner in Colombia's largest cocaine
syndicate.
On the night of June 24, 1984, Mr. Seal continued, he, a
co-pilot and a mechanic headed back to Managua to get the
coke, flying his newly acquired C-123 cargo craft. Hidden
within it was a secret camera, installed by the Central
Intelligence Agency at Rickenbacker Air Force Base in Ohio.
Although the camera didn't work right, he said, he managed to
squeeze off dozens of grainy, shadowy photographs.
Most of them show a few men in casual attire lounging
against a grassy background. Mr. Seal identified one as Mr.
Vaughan, one as Mr. Escobar, the Colombian drug kingpin, and
a third as another Colombian drug dealer. Several pictures
show men, whom U.S. officials called soldiers, carrying
canvas bags.
After this trip the DEA sent Mr. Seal back down to
Nicaragua with $1 million, and he said he arranged with Mr.
Vaughan for another cocaine shipment. But in mid-July of
1984, DEA agent Joura remembers getting a call from his
agency in Washington saying that a story based on Mr. Seal's
C-123 trip would shortly appear in the Washington Times.
Chances of using Mr. Seal to catch members of the
Colombian drug cartel vanished. "At that time, there was a
Contra funding bill that was up for approval, and I guess
that precipitated the leak of the photographs," says Mr.
Joura. "It ruined the case. We hoped to go a lot further with
it."
Mr. Joura did have time to tell Mr. Seal to round up some
Florida distributors and another pilot for a meeting so they
could be arrested. (It was at the 1985 Miami trial of these
men that Mr. Seal, as a government witness, related his
Nicaraguan story. He repeated it at another federal drug
trial that year, in Las Vegas.)
The Washington Times story, which touched off many other
press accounts, quoted "U.S. sources" as saying that "a
number of highly placed Nicaraguan government officials
actively participated in the drug smuggling operation,"
naming Interior Minister Borge and Defense Minister Humberto
Ortega. U.S. officials have said that the defense minister
could be implicated because the drug shipment used a military
airfield, Los Brasiles.
But the State Department now confirms reports from
Nicaragua that Los Brasiles is a civilian airfield used
mainly for agricultural flights. It is also listed as a
civilian field in a Defense Department Flight Information
Publication.
The Justice Department said in 1984 that
cocaine-processing labs had been established in Nicaragua and
that the drug was being shipped in "multi-ton" amounts.
Within a month after the story of the flight broke in the
press, Mr. Vaughan was indicted.
The department says it knows that Mr. Seal's C-123 went to
Nicaragua because a device aboard the plane enabled
satellites to track it. But Mr. Gregorie, the federal
prosecutor in Miami, and the DEA's Mr. Joura concede that
their only evidence of who Mr. Vaughan is comes from Mr. Seal
and a tape of a call to a man Mr. Seal identified as him. The
Nicaraguan government says that a Federico Vaughan worked in
1982 and 1983 as the deputy manager of an export-import
company run by the Sandinista government but had left before
the Seal flight and was never an aide to a commandant.
Mr. Vaughan hasn't been put on trial. Though the U.S. has
an extradition treaty with Nicaragua, the federal prosecutors
never tried to extradite Mr. Vaughan. Mr. Gregorie says the
State Department told him it would be futile.
While the account of Sandinista drug involvement brought
swift Justice Department action, U.S. officials have rejected
accusations of major drug trafficking by the Contras. The
handling of those accusations now is being reviewed by two
congressional committees and the independent counsel for the
Iran-Contra affair.
"There have been allegations that the laws have not been
evenly and appropriately carried out, so we're looking into
that," says Hayden Gregory, an investigator for a House
Judiciary Committee subcommittee.
The imprisoned drug pilots say Mr. Seal was involved in
flights that brought weapons to Central American airfields
for the Contras and sometimes returned to the U.S. with
drugs. The pilots claim that their Contra weapons deliveries
were directed by the CIA. The people they say they worked
with are known to have been supervised or monitored by the
CIA and by Lt. Col. Oliver North, the National Security
Council staffer fired for his role in the program to sell
arms to Iran and fund the Contras. As is its practice, the
Central Intelligence Agency refuses to comment.
Mr. Seal once was a pilot with Trans World Airlines, but
he lost the job in 1972 after being charged with smuggling
explosives to Mexico. The explosives, he later testified in
federal court in Las Vegas, were for CIA-trained personnel
trying to overthrow Cuba's Fidel Castro. An appeals court
threw out the indictment.
Fred Hampton, whose Mena, Ark., firm does a global
business repairing aircraft, says Mr. Seal used to talk in
1982 and 1983 about working for the CIA. He says Mr. Seal was
secretive about it but discussed aerial reconnaissance of
Nicaraguan air bases when the subject came up.
Jack Terrell, a former Contra mercenary who now opposes
U.S. intervention in Nicaragua, says that "we knew he {Mr.
Seal} was flying for the Contras" at Aguacote, a Honduran
supply base. And a jailed drug pilot named Gary Betzner says
he once ran into Mr. Seal at Illopango air base in El
Salvador, where much of the Contra weaponry was transshipped.
Another imprisoned drug pilot, Michael Tolliver, says he
was recruited into the Contra supply network by Mr. Seal,
whom he had known since they were both airplane enthusiasts in
Louisiana. He says Mr. Seal called him in the spring of 1985
and said, "I've got some interesting flying for you to do."
Says Mr. Tolliver: "I figured it was government because
everybody knew he was working for the government."
Following Mr. Seal's drug convictions, his undercover
efforts served him well with sentencing judges. In federal
court in Fort Lauderdale, Judge Norman C. Roettger reduced a
10-year drug sentence to six months' probation after DEA
agents spoke to him. The judge specifically praised Mr.
Seal's cooperation in the Nicaraguan case. Then, under a deal
worked out with the Justice Department, Mr. Seal also got
probation for another Florida drug conviction and for drug
charges in Louisiana.
But the judge in the Louisiana case, upset at the leniency
of the Justice Department terms, required Mr. Seal to spend
nights during his probation at a Salvation Army shelter in
Baton Rouge. The requirement made him easy for his enemies to
find, and one day early last year some of them did. Three
Colombian men have been charged with killing him.
Of the two others Mr. Seal said went to Nicaragua on the
C-123, one, co-pilot Emile Camp, died in a crash of his
one-man plane. The other, mechanic Peter Everson, who has
never been charged or asked to testify, won't discuss Mr.
Seal's story except to say he would corroborate it if called.
He lives in a fortress-like building in Louisiana.
One final footnote: Mr. Seal's C-123, after a change in
ownership, crashed in Nicaragua last October while on a
Contra supply run. The Nicaraguans captured an American cargo
handler who survived. His name was Eugene Hasenfus, and his
capture began the unraveling of secret U.S. efforts to supply
the Contras.
________
Too bad the rest of the American media ignored this, and much more
evidence, that operatives connected to the Central Intelligence
Agency were, and are, deeply involved with the global narcotics
trade.
L
Subject: Dennis Byrne: Professional Skeptic or Professional Idiot?
F