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The Crimes of Mena
 
Clinton and the Cult of Intelligence
 
The following are excerpts from an article by former National
Security Council staffer Roger Morris and Sally Denton. This
amazing story was scheduled to appear in the *Washington Post on
January 29 - after months of delay by the Clintonites and the CIA
cultists at the *Post. However, in a last minute turnaround by the
editor of the *Post, the story was not published (see accompanying
item from *The Sunday Telegraph).
 
If the story ever makes headline news it is almost certain to
bring down the Clinton presidency. Moreover, though, it threatens
much more than a presidency - it exposes the total corrupt and
debased nature of consecutive U.S. Administrations.
 
Of the many stories emerging from the Arkansas of the 1980s that
was the crucible of the Clinton presidency, none has been more
elusive - nor more ominous - than the specter of major drug
smuggling, gunrunning and money laundering tracing to the tiny
town of Mena, nestled in the dense pine forests of the Ouachita
Mountains some 150 miles due west of Little Rock.
 
Local Internal Revenue Service agent Bill Duncan, Arkansas State
Police investigator Russell Welch, Arkansas Attorney General
Winston Bryant, then-Congressman Bill Alexander and various other
officials and citizens in the state all believed by the late 1980s
that they had what Bryant termed "credible evidence" of the most
serious criminal activity involving Mena between 1981 and 1986,
crimes seemingly with the acquiescence if not complicity of
elements of the U.S. government. Mena's obscure Intermountain
Airport they thought to be a base for Adler Berriman (Barry) Seal,
a self-confessed, convicted smuggler whose operations were said to
be linked to the intelligence community, and who was murdered by
Colombian assassins early in 1986 after Seal testified for the
U.S. government in a prosecution of leaders of the Medellin drug
cartel.
 
After 1987, Duncan, Welch and others pressed for a number of
official investigations into the alleged Mena connection. To their
mounting dismay and alarm, every inquiry would be inexplicably
ineffectual or else stifled altogether, and their own careers
damaged in the process, furthering their suspicions of
higher-level collusion and cover-up - and in any case leaving the
larger mystery of what had really happened in the woods of western
Arkansas.
 
Now, however, a new mass of documentary evidence relating to Barry
Seal has come to light, substantiating the worst suspicions about
Mena as never before.
 
Gathered from various sources over the course of the past year,
the more than 2,000 documents span the years 1981-1986, and
include Seal's bank and telephone records; negotiable instruments,
promissory notes and invoices; personal correspondence; address
and appointment books; bills of sale for aircraft and parts;
aircraft registration and modification work orders; personal
diaries, handwritten "to do" lists and other private notes;
secretly tape-recorded conversations; cryptographic keys and
legends for codes used in the Seal operation; numerous depositions
and other sworn statements - and, not least, extensive official
records, including federal investigative and surveillance reports,
accounting assessments by the IRS and Drug Enforcement Agency, and
previousIy unreported court testimony as well as confidential
pre-sentencing memoranda in federal narcotics trafficking trials
in Florida and Nevada.
 
Startling Evidence
 
Among only a few of its revelations, the Seal Archive provides
documentation:
 
* That Mena, Arkansas from 1981 to 1986 was indeed one of the
centers of an international smuggling traffic, amounting - by
official IRS and DEA calculations, sworn court testimony and other
corroborative records - to many thousands of pounds or kilos of
cocaine and heroin, and literally hundreds of millions of dollars
in drug profits.
 
* That Seal himself spent hundreds of thousands at the Mena
airport to land, base, maintain and specially equip or refit his
aircraft for smuggling. According to personal and business
records, he had extensive associations locally at Mena and in
Little Rock, and was in nearly constant telephone contact with
Mena when he was not there himself, including repeated calls just
before the day of his murder in 1986.
 
* That as a former member of the U.S. Army's Special Forces, Seal
had ties to the Central Intelligence Agency dating to the early
1970s. He had confided to relatives and others, according to their
sworn statements, that he was a CIA operative before and during
the period when he was establishing his operations at Mena.
 
* That Federal Aviation Administration registration records
confirm that aircraft officially identified or admitted to be in
the Seal smuggling operation at Mena and elsewhere were previously
owned by Air America, Inc., a known CIA "proprietary" company.
Emile Camp, one of Seal's pilots and a witness to some of his most
significant dealings, was killed on a mountainside near Mena in
1985, in the unexplained crash of one of those planes previously
belonging to Air America.
 
* According to still other Seal records, at least some of the
aircraft of his smuggling fleet, which numbered a Learjet,
helicopters, and former U.S. military transports, were also
outfitted with avionics and other equipment by yet another company
in turn linked to Air America.
 
* That among the aircraft flown in and out of Mena was Seal's
C-123K cargo plane, christened *Fat Lady. The records show that
*Fat Lady, serial number 54-0679, was sold by Seal months before
his death. According to still other files, the plane soon found
its way to a "phantom company" of what became known in the
Iran-contra scandal as "The Enterprise," the CIA-related secret
entity managed by then-Col. Oliver North and others to smuggle
illegal weapons to the Nicaraguan contra rebels, and, according to
former Drug Enforcement Agency agent Celerino Castillo and others,
allegedly involved as well in a return traffic in cocaine, profits
from which were then used to finance more clandestine gunrunning.
 
* Federal aviation records show that in October, 1986, the same
*Fat Lady from Mena, serial number 54-0679, was shot down over
Nicaragua with a load of arms destined for the contras. The doomed
aircraft was co-piloted by a Wallace Blaine (Buzz) Sawyer who was
himself from Magnolia in western Arkansas and who died in the
crash. It was the lone surviving crew member in that downing,
Eugene Hasenfus, whose admission of covert activity began a public
unraveling of the Iran-contra episode.
 
* That the hundreds of millions in profits generated by the Seal
trafficking via Mena and elsewhere resulted in extraordinary
banking and business practices in apparent efforts to "launder" or
disperse the vast illicit money in Arkansas and elsewhere. The
Seal financial records show for the early 1980s, for example,
instances of daily deposits of $50,000 or more, and extensive use
of an offshore, foreign bank in the Caribbean as well as financial
institutions in Arkansas and Florida. (On October 9, the London
*Sunday Telegraph reported independently the existence of
"numerous" other foreign bank accounts in Seal's name, including
one said to contain over a billion dollars.)
 
* That Seal was scarcely alone in his extensive smuggling through
Mena and elsewhere over the period 1981-86, commonly described in
both federal and state law enforcement files among the Seal papers
as one of the largest drug trafficking operations in the U.S. at
the time, if not in the history of the drug trade. He was "only
the transport," documents show Seal confiding on one occasion,
pointing to an extensive network of narcotics distribution and
finance in Arkansas and other states. As one example, the Seal
records show him to have been a close associate of a group
eventually prosecuted for major narcotics trafficking in
neighboring Kentucky.
 
* That in explicit recognition of Seal's extraordinary
significance in the drug trade - and thus of the magnitude and
importance of Mena as one of his main bases - U.S. government
prosecutors made him their chief witness in a 1985 Miami trial *in
absentia* of Medellin drug lords, in another 1985 trial of what
federal officials regarded as the largest narcotics trafficking
case to date in Las Vegas, Nevada, and in still a third
prosecution of corrupt officials in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
At the same time, court records and other documents reveal a
studied indifference by government prosecutors to Seal's earlier
and ongoing operations in Mena.
 
The Barry Seal files are vindication for dedicated officials in
Arkansas and others who kept an all-too-authentic story alive amid
wider indifference. What happened to some nine different official
investigations into Mena after 1987, from allegedly compromised
federal grand juries to congressional inquiries suppressed by the
National Security Council in 1988 under Ronald Reagan, to still
later Justice Department inaction under George Bush?
 
Officials apparently invoked "national security" to quash most of
the invesigations. Court documents do show clearly that the CIA
and DEA employed Seal in 1984-85 for the Reagan administration's
celebrated "sting" attempting to implicate thc Nicaraguan
Sandinista regime in cocaine trafficking.
 
Having assessed Seal posthumously for some $86 million in back
taxes on his huge smuggler's earnings from Mena and elsewhere
between 1981 and 1983, as his tax records show, even the IRS
forgave hundreds of millions in known drug and gun profits over
the ensuing two-year period when Seal was in effect moonlighting
for the U.S.  government. "... Worked for the DEA/CIA," an IRS
agent noted pointedly across one of the papers in a file on Seal's
taxes.
 
But to follow the IRS logic, what of the years, crimes and profits
at Mena in the early 1980s *before* Barry Seal became an
acknowledged federal operative, and then reported drug trafficking
activities at Mena even after his murder, crimes far removed from
his admitted cooperation as government informant and witness?
Government investigators apparently had no doubt about the scope
and magnitude of those crimes. According to U.S. Customs sources,
Seal's operations at Mena and other bases were involved in the
export of guns to Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil as well as the
contras, and the importation of cocaine from Colombia to be sold
in New York, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis and other cities, as well
as in Arkansas itself.
 
Yet again and again over the years, lower level federal or state
law enforcement officers looking into the crimes of Mena found
themselves stymied by the apparent presence of the CIA or other
government involvement. "Joe [deleted] works for Seal, and cannot
be touched because Seal works for the CIA," as one U.S. Customs
official put it in an Arkansas investigation in the early 1980s.
"... A CIA or DEA operation is taking place at the Mena airport,"
an FBI telex advised the Arkansas State Police in August, 1987, 18
months after Seal's assassination.
 
Significantly, none of the putative inquiries into Mena seems to
have made a serious effort to gather even a fraction of the
available Seal documents now assembled and studied by the
authors.
 
In over 2,000 documents reflecting intimately a man of meticulous
organization and planning, careful about every detail, Barry Seal
seems to have felt singularly and utterly secure - if not somehow
invulnerable - at least in the air transport and delivery in the
U.S. of tons of cocaine, done ceaselessly for more than five
years. His most personal papers show him all but unconcerned about
the very flights and drops, say law enforcement sources, that
would indeed have been protected or "fixed" by the collusion of
U.S. intelligence.
 
If the Seal documents show anything, an attentive reader might
conclude, it is that ominous implication of some official
sanction. Over the entire episode looms the unmistakable dark
shape of U.S. government complicity in vast drug trafficking and
gunrunning, and in a decade-long cover-up of the criminality.
 
Clinton's Involvement
 
Finally, of course, there are somber questions about then-Gov.
Bill Clinton's own role *vis-a-vis the crimes of Mena. He has
acknowledged learning officially about Mena only in April, 1988,
though a state police investigation of Mena, reportedly amounting
to thousands of pages, had been in progress for several years, and
as the state's chief executive Clinton was customarily abreast of
such inquiries. In his one public statement on the matter as
governor in September, 1991, he spoke of that state police
investigation finding "linkages to the federal government" and
"all kinds of questions about whether he [Seal] had any links to
the CIA... and if that backed into the Iran-contra deal."
 
But then, inexplicably, Clinton did not at any time seize on the
issue or offer further support for any inquiry, "despite the
fact," as Bill Plante and Michael Singer of CBS News have written,
"that a Republican administration was apparently sponsoring a
contra aid operation in his state and protecting a smuggling ring
that flew tons of cocaine through Arkansas."
 
Moreover, what of the hundreds of millions generated by Seal's
Mena contraband? The Seal records reveal his dealings with at
least one major Little Rock bank. How much drug money from him or
his associates made its way into criminal laundering in Arkansas's
notoriously free-wheeling financial institutions and bond houses,
some of which are reportedly under investigation by the Whitewater
Special Prosecutor for just such large, unaccountable infusions of
cash and unexplained transactions? "The state offers an enticing
climate for traffickers... " IRS agents had concluded by the end
of the 1980s, documenting a "major increase" in the amount of
large cash and bank transactions in the state after 1985, despite
a struggling local economy.
 
Meanwhile, others who were prominent backers of Clinton over the
same years have themselves been subjects of extensive
investigative and surveillance files by the DEA and FBI similar to
those relating to Seal. "This may be the first president in
history with such close buddies who have NADDIS numbers," says one
concerned law enforcement official, referring to the Narcotics and
Dangerous Drugs Intelligence System numbers assigned those under
protracted investigation for possible drug crimes. The Seal
documents seem still more proof that for Clinton, the Arkansas of
the 1980s, and the company he kept there, will not soon disappear
as a political or even constitutional liability.
 
"I've always felt we never got the whole story there..." Clinton
said in his 1991 statement on Mena. Indeed. But as president of
the United States, he need no longer wonder - and neither does the
nation. On the basis of the Seal documents (copies of which are
being given to the Whitewater Special Prosecutor in any case), the
president should ask immediately for a full report on the matter
from what is now the CIA, DEA, FBI, Justice Department and other
relevant agencies of his own administration, including the
long-buried evidence gathered by Duncan and Welch. Clinton should
also offer full executive branch cooperation with a re-opened
congressional inquiry, and expose the subject fully, for what it
says of both our past and future.
 
As for Seal, he saw himself as a patriot to the end. He had
dictated his own epitaph for his grave in Baton Rouge: "A rebel
adventurer the likes of whom in previous days made America great."
In a sense, his documents may now render that claim less ironic
than it seems.
 
>From *New American View*, February, 1995. PO Box 999, Herndon,
Virginia.
 
 
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