THIS WEBSITE DESIGNED AND CREATED BY JEFF WILLIAMSON / DJ BLAZE
INSIDERS WHO PROVIDED INFORMATION ON CORRUPTION
IN GOVERNMENT OFFICES AND COVERT GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS
THE CIA- LARGEST DRUGRUNNERS IN THE WORLD
http://www.freewebs.com/ciadrugrunners THIS WEBSITE CONTAINS FORMER FAA INVESTIGATORS CIA SOURCES TESTIMONY ON CIA and GOVERNMENT COVERT OPERATIONS INCLUDING REPORTS AND DESCRIPTION OF 4000 PAGE TRANSCRIPT FORCED UPON THE FAA; THE CIA ARE THE LARGEST DRUG RUNNERS IN THE WORLD; NEWS ARTICLE THE CIA MURDERS TWO CHILDREN IN ARKANSAS WHO CAME ACROSS CIA DRUG DELIVERY; TO READ MORE ON CIA FRONT EVERGREEN AIRLINES CLICK HERE: Evergreen's employees BUSTED for cocaine trafficking by special agents on September 8, 1999 in Miami PLUS MUCH MORE HERE... THE THEME SONG FOR THIS WEBSITE IS MARILYN MANSON "DOPE SHOW"
Video: Cover up - The Iran-Contra affair part 1 (8 min 43 sec) part 2 (12 min 05 sec)
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ciadrugs/witness_list.html Witness List For House Hearings
http://ciadrugs.homestead.com/files/kerryinvestigation.html Senate Committee Report
http://www.independent-media.tv/item.cfm?fmedia_id=9570&fcategory_desc=The%20Bush%20Crime%20Family How John Kerry Exposed the CIA-Contra Cocaine Scandal
http://www.powderburns.org/indictment.html Kingpin Indictment of George H.W. Bush
http://www.wethepeople.la/seal2.htm CIA Linked To Seals Assassination-George W. Bush's Personal Phone Number found in Seal's Trunk
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/nsaebb2.htm The Contra,Cocaine,& Covert Operations
http://www.csun.edu/CommunicationStudies/ben/news/cia/ Websites & Links on CIA Drugrunners
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB113/ The Oliver North File
FAA EXPERT RODNEY STICH
http://www.defraudingamerica.com/author_bio.html Expert Rodney Stich
Source and group member # 1: (Rodney Stich) (Former federal
inspector-investigator for the FAA, with years of continuous contacts
with many former CIA and other deep-cover operatives.)
His 30 years of seeking to expose government corruption, starting as
an insider, a government investigator, and his many deep-cover
contacts, gives him the ability to tie together the various criminal
activities. His testimony and documents would prove, among other
things:
Decades of CIA drug trafficking into the United States. As an airline
pilot in the 1950s, he learned from other pilots in Tokyo and Beirut
that they were flying drugs for CIA-related activities. From
approximately 1987 Stich learned from his many former CIA and other
deep-cover sources. This group includes pilots who flew the drugs,
people who had mid-level responsibilities in various areas of the
drug activities, people who arranged for drug-money laundering
through CIA bank facilities. These assets have provided Stich with
affidavits, hundreds of documents, letters, detailing the criminal
and subversive activities involving high-level government personnel.
Personal knowledge of judicial looting of bankruptcy court assets,
augmented by information from his CIA sources.
Criminal cover-up and obstruction of justice by high-level government
and non-government personnel. Stich details in his books the
high-level cover-up and obstruction of justice by federal judges,
Justice Department officials, much of the establishment media. These
are criminal acts under federal law, and permitted to continue great
harm upon the United States and most of its people.
Retaliation by federal judges and Justice Department employees,
seeking to silence his reporting of criminal misconduct related to a
series of airline crashes, his attempts to expose the CIA and other
links to drug smuggling, silence his exposure of judicial corruption,
among others. This retaliation is proven by judicial records.
Other criminal activities involving CIA, Justice Department
employees, federal judges, and members of Congress.
Stich's evidence includes:
Hundreds of FAA reports and a 4000-page transcript of a hearing that
he forced upon the FAA, during which he acted as a form of
independent prosecutor. The evidence and testimony proved the
relationship between criminal misconduct and a series of
fraud-related and specific airline crashes, which continued to occur
during the hearing, and for years afterwards.
Federal actions filed by Stich seeking to report the criminal
activities that he discovered, including the federal offenses
associated with the airline crashes and then seeking to report the
criminal activities implicating federal officials and those acting in
their behalf (standard disavow tactics). The attempt to report
federal crimes to a federal judge is provided, and required, under
federal criminal statute, Title 18 USC Section 4.
Sequestered government documents that he obtained while a federal
investigator, judicial records, and obtained from his many CIA and
other deep-cover sources.
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Source # 2: Former Special Ops counter terrorism expert. His
information revealed:
While conducting military related seminars in Europe for Russian and
Lithuanian government and military personnel, he learned of suitcase
nuclear bombs and nuclear material being sold to terrorists, and
discovered from his Russian sources that Russian moles existed in the
FBI and CIA.
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Source # 3: CIA-ONI operative from the 1960s through 1980s, in mid to
high-level covert activities, in various areas of covert activities).
His information revealed:
Pattern of CIA-directed and condoned assassinations.
CIA drug trafficking from the Middle and Far East, the Caribbean and
Central and South America, including the Los Angeles area, and
aspects of the drugging of the blacks not previously revealed (such
as funding CIA drug purchases from assets looted in bankruptcy
court); joint activities with organized crime figures in drug
smuggling and looting of savings and loans.
Judicial looting of bankruptcy court assets. Some of the looted funds
were used to fund CIA drug purchases. These criminal activities
involve federal judges, Justice Department trustees and other
government employees, law firms and attorneys.
Involvement in October Surprise scheme, that corrupted the 1980
presidential elections.
Bribing federal judges, and how they receive their bribe funds.
CIA role in setting up the Medellin and Cali cartels, making it
easier for the CIA to coordinate drug sales.
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Source # 4: Former U.S. Army helicopter pilot, sheep-dipped to
Central Intelligence Agency. His information revealed:
Personal knowledge of CIA, National Security Council and White
House-directed drug shipments on military and CIA helicopters, the
cooperation of the military in the drugging of America, and
involvement of well-known national figures.
Personal knowledge of high-level involvement in drug-related
activities. He carried on his helicopter trips such well-known
figures as Oliver North, Dan Lasater, Buddy Young, William Barr
(while attorney for Southern Air Transport and before he became US
attorney general), Buddy Young (aide to Governor Bill Clinton), Felix
Rodriguez (responsible to George Bush), to drug-related activities.
These include inspection of drug laboratories, and once to a meeting
with General Noriega and Barry Seal (the purpose of which was to
discover where the drug money was being siphoned off on the Panama to
Arkansas route).
Drugs to Arkansas. He flew drugs on US Army helicopters to Little
Rock and Mena from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, including delivery to Dan
Lasater and Buddy Young.
Military flight plans showing passengers and comments relating to
drugs being carried. This witness has a great number of military
flight plans showing his flights, who his passengers were, with
comments on the flight plans showing carriage of drugs in coolers
fraudulently marked "medical supplies." These flight plans included
drug-carrying flights from Fort Campbell, Kentucky to Little Rock and
Mena, Arkansas, delivering "medical supplies" in coolers to a
"Doctor" Lasater (aka Dan Lasater) and Buddy Young (head of security
for then-governor Bill Clinton). Supporting evidence includes
military flight plans, letters, affidavits, court filings, and tapes.
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Source # 5: (Head of a CIA proprietary airline). His information revealeds:
Extensive knowledge of CIA drug smuggling into the United States from
the Far East, as a result of being the titular head of a CIA
proprietary airline that frequently carried drugs. Details of
interaction with other CIA proprietary or front-airlines, including
Southern Air Transport and Evergreen Airlines. The airline was CIA
funded and equipped, and was based in Bangkok, with an office in
Miami. Activities included hauling drugs from the Far East to the
Philippines, where the drugs would be off-loaded onto other CIA
proprietary airlines, such as Southern Air Transport. Later, when
four-engine aircraft were provided, the drug-loaded planes went
directly to the United States.
Supporting evidence included testimony, from letters written by the
source, tapes of his deposition-like statements, affidavits (filed in
federal court proceedings) available, airline registration
certificate and bill of sale certificates conveying ownership of
C-130 aircraft to his airline.
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CIA Supplying Arms to IRA
Source # 6: (Former pilot working with the Drug Enforcement
Administration in Central and South America and the United States.)
He information revealed:
Arms being shipped by DEA and CIA to Contras and Sandinistas, in
violation of U.S. law, and showing the false premise used by U.S.
officials that they were supporting only one side, the Contras,
allegedly to combat the country from selecting the communistic form
of government. He flew the arms, provided by the DEA, in DEA-provided
aircraft, and returned with drugs, off-loading at DEA facilities.
Arms exchanged for drugs, and hauling of drugs back to the United
States, including unloading of drugs at DEA facilities at Addison
Airport and elsewhere. Can provide precise details, maps, about the
drug routes, landing strips, DEA and CIA contacts at each end, and
how arms were sent to both the Contras and the Sandinistas.
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Source # 7: (Former CIA asset specializing in CIA money laundering).
His information revealed:
CIA money laundering in Caribbean area, and CIA association with
several well-known criminals.
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Source # 8: (Former OSS operative and pilot during World War II; CIA
operative in Central and South America and the Far East. He was the
pilot for United Nations' Dag Hammarskjold and the Shah of Iran. His
information revealed:
CIA drug trafficking from the Middle East, Central and South America,
and the Far East. He flew drug loads for his CIA contacts, including
allegedly Theodore Shackley.
Assassinations that he allegedly carried out in South America for the CIA.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source # 9: (Former CIA-ONI, Navy Seal). His information revealed:
CIA-ordered assassinations. One being an alleged operation to
assassinate presidential candidate Bill Clinton at San Francisco in
1980.
Drug smuggling activities by the CIA.
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Source # 10: (Former head of a CIA financial proprietary in Hawaii).
His information revealed:
Secret funding of CIA domestic operations. Familiar with CIA
financial operations, including how CIA fronts are secretly funded.
CIA assisting Ferdinand Marcus with hiding stolen funds in the United
States while U.S. Department of Justice was seeking these funds.
Opening and funding secret off-shore bank accounts for high-level
U.S. officials. Familiar with how CIA funnels money to CIA
proprietaries, how CIA opened and funded secret off-shore bank
accounts for high-level federal officials.
Typical example of CIA disavow tactics, fraudulently denying
involvement in operations which they fund and direct.
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Source # 11: (CIA operative in Europe and the United States in the
1970s and 1980s). His information revealed:
CIA drug-related dealings with organized crime in the United States.
Involved directly in drug transfer between CIA and organized crime,
including the Gotti crime family, and using CIA bank facilities to
launder organized crime's drug money into offshore bank accounts.
October Surprise. Involved in October Surprise scheme.
Involved in CIA money laundering. Did money laundering for the CIA,
and laundered drug money for the Gotti crime family, using CIA bank
sources.
Believed to be involved in CIA looting of financial institutions.
Gave congressional testimony about drugs, drug-money laundering, etc.
Testified about these activities to Congress in 1989. Transcript
available. Congress, as usual, covered up.
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Source # 12: (CIA operative in Europe and the United States in 1970s
and 1980s): His information revealed:
Former CIA operative. Involved in CIA-related activities with savings
and loans and other financial institutions.
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Source # 12:(CIA operative in Europe during 1960s, 1970, 1980s): His
information revealed:
Involvement in October Surprise clean-up operations, removing all
records relating to the secret meetings in Paris with George Bush and
other U.S. personnel.
Involvement in other CIA covert activities that were criminal in nature.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source # 13:(former CIA asset.) His information revealed:
Involved in money laundering associated with October Surprise, moving
money for bribing Iranians.
Altering the Inslaw software stolen by Justice Department officials
and a subsequent federal judge.
Movement of drug money for the CIA
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Source # 14:(Former CIA-ONI asset). His information revealed:
CIA drug activities and drug-money laundering.
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Source # 15: (member of former army Special Operations Group). His
information revealed:
Military's involvement in drug trafficking, setting up radio beacons
for small aircraft to navigate from Colombia to Panama at very low
levels.
CIA-military spying on state-level politicians.
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Source # 16: (trained small-plane contra pilots in Arkansas, worked
with NSC Oliver North and William Barr). His information revealed:
Drug smuggling into the United States by the National Security
Council and particularly Oliver North.
Involvement of high-level federal officials (including Oliver North,
William Barr (before being appointed U.S. Attorney General over the
Justice Department.
Involvement of government personnel in Arkansas, including Bill Clinton.
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Source # 17: (ONI asset, working on offshore oil rigs.) His
information revealed:
Drugs being off-loaded at oil rigs, and then sent by helicopter or
boat to shore.
Knowledge about then-governor Bill Clinton's Arkansas drug activities.
CIA drug smuggling into the United States.
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Source # 18: (Former captain for major airline on routes from United
States to Central and South America). His information revealed:
Drugs and drug-money being shipped regularly on scheduled airline
flights to Central and South America and return. Witnessed pallets of
drugs being loaded on his aircraft on the northbound flights, and
pallets of money being shipped southward to Central and South America.
Testified to Congress (as with other deep-cover sources, his
information about drug trafficking was covered up.)
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Source # 19: (former CID investigator, extensive investigative
experience in private, federal and for foreign countries). His
information revealed:
CIA drug trafficking involving the CIA and other government entities.
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Source # 20: (private investigator, especially on HUD and CIA
misconduct in Denver area: His information revealed:
Corruption involving HUD, savings and loan, drug activities, and CIA
involvement, primarily in the Denver area.
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Source # 21: (former CIA operative heavily involved in drug-related
activities). His information revealed:
Drug smuggling activities by the CIA and National Security Council,
among others.
He testified to Congress in the past, and given information to the
media, about drug smuggling involving the CIA, NSC, and involving
White House personnel during the Contra operation.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source # 22: (attorney residing in Washington, DC, who worked closely
with Stich and source # 2). His information revealed:
CIA drug trafficking, October Surprise, Inslaw, and other crimes.
Found dead under mysterious circumstances. The files on the hard
drive of his computer were erased, his computer floppy disks were
taken, as were his 55 audio tapes and their transcripts of
information given by a former CIA operative.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source # 23:(attorney residing in San Francisco, exchanging
information with Stich). His information revealed:
Endemic corruption in bankruptcy courts in San Francisco, implicating
federal judges, Justice Department officials, attorneys and law
firms, and the CIA, looting the assets of innocent people who naively
exercised the statutory protections of Chapter 11.
Killed the night before the FBI was to receive his evidence. File on
his computer hard drive were erased and his floppy disks and records
taken from his office.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source # 24: (Former DIA operative, who worked with DEA in the Middle
East). His information revealed:
CIA-DEA drug smuggling from the Middle East, in conjunction with
Lebanese and Syrian drug traffickers, using civilian airliners for
the drug-smuggling pipeline. His testimony would help to show how the
bomb was placed on Pan Am 103; would show the Justice Department
cover-up and obstruction of justice (among other criminal offenses);
would show the misuse of federal power and sources to criminally
retaliate against those who expose government misconduct.
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Source # 25: (Former DEA agent). His information revealed:
The repeated actions of Justice Department officials who blocked
prosecution of CIA-DEA-related drug trafficking into the United
States.
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Source # 26: (Management in steel mill) His information revealed:
CIA involvement in sending aircraft fraudulently sold as junk to
foreign governments.
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Source # 27:(Head of an all-black assassination team). His
information revealed:
CIA operation in Indochina, commenced about five years before the
start of the Vietnam War, with instructions to destabilize the
region, assassinating whoever they came in contact with, including
American advisors and military personnel. This mindset coincides with
the School of the Americas and other assassination activities
directed by the CIA.
Orders to extract if possible, or to kill if necessary, American
defectors and POWs, with involvement of White House, CIA, Marine
Corps, officials, among others.
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Source # 28: (Former DEA agent). His information revealed:
The repeated actions of Justice Department personnel blocking
prosecution of CIA-DEA related drug trafficking into the United
States.
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Source # 29: (former IRS investigator). His information revealed:
CIA-DEA drug trafficking at Mena Airport and other locations.
Obstruction of justice by Justice Department employees and
then-Governor Bill Clinton.
Drug-money laundering activities involving the CIA.
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Source # 30: (former FBI Special Agent). His information revealed:
CIA-DEA drug trafficking reported by FBI Special Agents.
High level government misconduct in Irangate; Iraqgate; known to the
FBI years before these corrupt acts were known to the media.
Cover-up by the FBI of these criminal and treasonous acts against the
United States.
High level threats to agents not to report such offenses.
False charges and retaliation against FBI Special Agent to silence
and discredit these disclosures.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source # 31: (daughter of former organized crime figure and CIA
paymaster). Her information revealed:
Close connections between organized crime families and the CIA in
drug trafficking.
Money distribution between organized crime families and the CIA.
CIA use of organized crime to commit assassinations in the United States.
Other CIA-organized crime relationships.
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Source # 32: former agent of the IRS. His information revealed:
Drug trafficking that he discovered in Arkansas and obstruction of
justice by Justice Department employees.
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Source # 33: investigator for the State of Arkansas. His information revealed:
Drug trafficking in Arkansas and the cover-up by state and federal
law enforcement personnel.
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Source # 34: law enforcement agent with the New York City police
department. His information revealed:
Drug trafficking into the United States involving Dominican Republic
drug traffickers, working with the CIA, and protected by state and
federal officials.
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Source # 35: former chief of Narcotics, INS office, in New York. His
information revealed:
Drug trafficking, some of it involving terrorists, and retaliation by
Justice Department personnel when he sought to investigate the
crimes. Links to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
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Source # 36: narcotic agent with the Pennsylvania attorney general's
office: His information revealed:
Dominican Republic drug traffickers working with the CIA and
protected by state and federal officials.
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Source # 37: Former Mafia member in New York City. His information revealed:
Corrupt activities between FBI agents in the New York City area and
organized crime. One of the activities included FBI agents giving
information to organized crime members of government informants, who
would then be murdered. This was similar to the FBI activities in
Boston that resulted in many government informants being murdered,
and innocent people sent to federal prison. These activities were
known to FBI headquarters in Washington, for years, who aided and
abetted these crimes.
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Source # 38: Former law enforcement agent in Texas. His information revealed:
Considerable information on drug smuggling within the Texas National
Guard and cover-up by the Texas governor.
The "Train Deaths"
August 23, 1987, in a rural community just south of Little Rock,
police officers murdered two teenage boys [Kevin Ives and Don
Henry] because they witnessed a police-protected drug drop. The
drop was part of a drug smuggling operation based at a small
airport in Mena, Arkansas. ... There were CIA operatives who took
advantage of the protection their positions gave them, and they
participated in saturating our country with drugs. Kevin and Don
were victims of this atrocious crime, and it is up to us to expose
those responsible,the CIA
The Crimes of Mena
This is the story that couldn't be suppressed.
An investigative report into a scandal that haunts the reputations
of three presidents — Reagan, Bush, and Clinton.
Barry Seal — gunrunner, drug trafficker, and covert C.I.A. operative
extraordinaire — is hardly a familiar name in American politics. But
nine years after he was murdered in a hail of bullets by Medellin
cartel hit men outside a Salvation Army shelter in Baton Rouge,
Louisiana, he has come back to haunt the reputations of three
American presidents.
Seal's legacy includes more than 2,000 newly discovered documents
that now verify and quantify much of what previously had been only
suspicion, conjecture, and legend. The documents confirm that from
1981 to his brutal death in 1986, Barry Seal carried on one of the
most lucrative, extensive, and brazen operations in the history of
the international drug trade, and that he did it with the evident
complicity, if not collusion, of elements of the United States
government, apparently with the acquiescence of Ronald Reagan's
administration, impunity from any subsequent exposure by George
Bush's administration, and under the usually acute political nose of
then Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.
The newly unearthed papers show the real Seal as far more impressive
and well-connected than the character played by Dennis Hopper in a
made-for-TV movie some years ago, loosely based on the smuggler's
life. The film portrayed the pudgy pilot as a hapless victim, caught
in a cross fire between bungling but benign government agencies and
Latin drug lords. The truth sprinkled through the documents is a
richer — and altogether more sinister — matter of national and
individual corruption. It is a tale of massive, socially devastating
crime, of what seems to have been an official cover-up to match, and,
not least, of the strange reluctance of so-called mainstream American
journalism to come to grips with the phenomenon and its ominous
implications — even when the documentary evidence had appeared.
The trail winds back to another slightly bruited but obscure name — a
small place in western Arkansas called Mena.
Of the many stories emerging from the Arkansas of the 1980s that was
crucible to the Clinton presidency, none has been more elusive than
the charges surrounding Mena. Nestled in the dense pine and hardwood
forests of the Oachita Mountains, some 160 miles west of Little Rock,
once thought a refuge for nineteenth-century border outlaws and even
a hotbed of Depression-era anarchists, the tiny town has been the
locale for persistent reports of drug smuggling, gunrunning, and
money laundering tracing to the early eighties, when Seal based his
aircraft at Mena's Intermountain Regional Airport.
From first accounts circulating locally in Arkansas, the story
surfaced nationally as early as 1989 in a Penthouse article called
"Snowbound," written by the investigative reporter John Cummings, and
in a Jack Anderson column, but was never advanced at the time by
other media. Few reporters covering Clinton in the 1992 campaign
missed hearing at least something about Mena. But it was obviously a
serious and demanding subject — the specter of vast drug smuggling
with C.I.A. involvement — and none of the major media pursued it
seriously During 1992, the story was kept alive by Sarah McClendon,
The Nation, and The Village Voice.
Then, after Clinton became president, Mena began to reappear. Over
the past year, CBS News and The Wall Street Journal have reported the
original, unquieted charges surrounding Mena, including the shadow of
some C.I.A. (or "national security") involvement in the gun and drug
traffic, and the apparent failure of then governor Clinton to pursue
evidence of such international crime so close to home.
"Seal was smuggling drugs and kept his planes at Mena," The Wall
Street Journal reported in 1994. "He also acted as an agent for the
D.E.A. In one of these missions, he flew the plane that produced
photographs of Sandinistas loading drugs in Nicaragua. He was killed
by a drug gang [Medellin cartel hit men] in Baton Rouge. The cargo
plane he flew was the same one later flown by Eugene Hasenfus when he
was shot down over Nicaragua with a load of contra supplies.
In a mix of wild rumor and random fact, Mena has also been a topic of
ubiquitous anti-Clinton diatribes circulated by right-wing extremists
— an irony in that the Mena operation was the apparent brainchild of
the two previous and Republican administrations.
Still, most of the larger American media have continued to ignore, if
not ridicule, the Mena accusations. Finding no conspiracy in the
Oachitas last July, a Washington Post reporter typically scoffed at
the "alleged dark deeds," contrasting Mena with an image as
"Clandestination, Arkansas ... Cloak and Dagger Capital of America."
Noting that The New York Times had "mentioned Mena primarily as the
headquarters of the American Rock Garden Society," the Columbia
Journalism Review in a recent issue dismissed "the conspiracy
theories" as of "dubious relevance."
A former Little Rock businessman, Terry Reed, has coauthored with
John Cummings a highly controversial book, Compromised: Clinton,
Bush, and the C.I.A., which describes a number of covert activities
around Mena, including a C.I.A. operation to train pilots and troops
for the Nicaraguan Contras, and the collusion of local officials.
Both the book and its authors were greeted with derision.
Now, however, a new mass of documentary evidence has come to light
regarding just such "dark deeds" — previously private and secret
records that substantiate as never before some of the worst and most
portentous suspicions about what went on at Mena, Arkansas, a decade
ago.
Given the scope and implications of the Mena story, it may be easy to
understand the media's initial skepticism and reluctance. But it was
never so easy to dismiss the testimony arid suspicions of some of
those close to the matter: Internal Revenue Service Agent Bill
Duncan, Arkansas State Police investigator Russell Welch, Arkansas
Attorney General J. Winston Bryant, Congressman Bill Alexander, and
various other local law-enforcement officials and citizens.
All of these people were convinced by the late eighties that there
existed what Bryant termed "credible evidence" of the most serious
criminal activity involving Mena between 1981 and 1986. They also
believed that the crimes were committed with the acquiescence, if not
the complicity, of elements of the U.S. government. But they couldn't
seem to get the national media to pay attention.
During the 1992 campaign, outside advisers and aides urged former
California governor Jerry Brown to raise the Mena issue against
Clinton — at least to ask why the Arkansas governor had not done more
about such serious international crime so close to home. But Brown,
too, backed away from the subject. I'll raise it if the major media
break it first," he told aides. "The media will do it, Governor," one
of them replied in frustration, "if only you'll raise it."
Mena's obscure airport was thought by the I.R.S., the F.B.I., U.S.
Customs, and the Arkansas State Police to be a base for Adler
Berriman "Barry" Seal, a self-confessed, convicted smuggler whose
operations had been linked to the intelligence community. Duncan and
Welch both spent years building cases against Seal and others for
drug smuggling and money laundering around Mena, only to see their
own law-enforcement careers damaged in the process.
What evidence they gathered, they have said in testimony and other
public statements, was not sufficiently pursued by the then U.S.
attorney for the region, J. Michael Fitzhugh, or by the I.R.S.,
Arkansas State Police, and other agencies. Duncan, testifying before
the joint investigation by the Arkansas state attorney general's
office and the United States Congress in June 1991, said that 29
federal indictments drafted in a Mena-based money-laundering scheme
had gone unexplored. Fitzhugh, responding at the time to Duncan's
charges, said, "This office has not slowed up any investigation ...
[and] has never been under any pressure in any investigation."
By 1992, to Duncan's and Welch's mounting dismay, several other
official inquiries into the alleged Mena connection were similarly
ineffectual or were stifled altogether, furthering their suspicions
of government collusion and cover-up. In his testimony before
Congress, Duncan said the I.R.S. "withdrew support for the
operations" and further directed him to "withhold information from
Congress and perjure myself."
Duncan later testified that he had never before experienced "anything
remotely akin to this type of interference.... Alarms were going
off," he continued, "and as soon as Mr. Fitzhugh got involved, he was
more aggressive in not allowing the subpoenas and in interfering in
the investigative process."
State policeman Russell Welch felt he was "probably the most
knowledgeable person" regarding the activities at Mena, yet he was
not initially subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury. Welch
testified later that the only reason he was ultimately subpoenaed at
all was because one of the grand jurors was from Mena and "told the
others that if they wanted to know something about the Mena airport,
they ought to ask that guy [Welch] out there in the hall."
State Attorney General Bryant, in a 1991 letter to the office of
Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel in the Iran-Contra
investigation, wondered "why no one was prosecuted in Arkansas
despite a mountain of evidence that Seal was using Arkansas as his
principal staging area during the years 1982 through 1985."
What actually went on in the woods of western Arkansas? The question
is still relevant for what it may reveal about certain government
operations during the time that Reagan and Bush were in the White
House and Clinton was governor of Arkansas.
In a mass of startling new documentation — the more than 2,000 papers
gathered by the authors from private and law-enforcement sources in a
year-long nationwide search — answers are found and serious questions
are posed.
These newly unearthed documents — the veritable private papers of
Barry Seal — substantiate at least part of what went on at Mena.
What might be called the Seal archive dates back to 1981, when Seal
began his operations at the Intermountain Regional Airport in Mena.
The archive, all of it now in our possession, continues beyond
February 1986, when Seal was murdered by Colombian assassins after he
had testified in federal court in Las Vegas, Fort Lauderdale, and
Miami for the U.S. government against leaders of the Medellin drug
cartel.
The papers include such seemingly innocuous material as Seal's bank
and telephone records; negotiable instruments, promissory notes, and
invoices; personal correspondence address and appointment books;
bills of sale for aircraft and boats; aircraft registration, and
modification work orders.
In addition, the archive also contains personal diaries; handwritten
to-do lists and other private notes; secretly tape-recorded
conversations; and cryptographic keys and legends for codes used in
the Seal operation.
Finally, there are extensive official records: federal investigative
and surveillance reports, accounting assessments by the I.R.S. and
the D.E.A., and court proceedings not previously reported in the
press — testimony as well as confidential pre-sentencing memoranda in
federal narcotics-trafficking trials in Florida and Nevada — numerous
depositions, and other sworn statements.
The archive paints a vivid portrait not only of a major criminal
conspiracy around Mena, but also of the unmistakable shadow of
government complicity. Among the new revelations:
Mena, from 1981 to 1985, was indeed one of the centers for
international smuggling traffic. According to official I.R.S. and
D.E.A. calculations, sworn court testimony, and other corroborative
records, the traffic amounted to thousands of kilos of cocaine and
heroin and literally hundreds of millions of dollars in drug profits.
According to a 1986 letter from the Louisiana attorney general to
then U.S. attorney general Edwin Meese, Seal "smuggled between $3
billion and $5 billion of drugs into the U.S."
Seal himself spent considerable sums to land, base, maintain, and
specially equip or refit his aircraft for smuggling. According to
personal and business records, he had extensive associations at Mena
and in Little Rock, and was in nearly constant telephone contact with
Mena when he was not there himself. Phone records indicate Seal made
repeated calls to Mena the day before his murder. This was long after
Seal, according to his own testimony, was working as an
$800,000-a-year informant for the federal government.
A former member of the Army 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 C.I.A. operative before and during the
period when he established his operations at Mena. In one statement
to Louisiana State Police, a Seal relative said, "Barry was into
gunrunning and drug smuggling in Central and South America ... and he
had done some time in El Salvadore [sic]." Another then added, "lt
was true, but at the time Barry was working for the C.I.A."
In a posthumous jeopardy-assessment case against Seal — also
documented in the archive — the I.R.S. determined that money earned
by Seal between 1984 and 1986 was not illegal because of his
"C.I.A.-D.E.A. employment." The only public official acknowledgment
of Seal's relationship to the C.I.A. has been in court and
congressional testimony, and in various published accounts describing
the C.I.A.'s installation of cameras in Seal's C-123K transport
plane, used in a highly celebrated 1984 sting operation against the
Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.
Robert Joura, the assistant special agent in charge of the D.E.A.'s
Houston office and the agent who coordinated Seal's undercover work,
told The Washington Post last year that Seal was enlisted by the
C.I.A. for one sensitive mission — providing photographic evidence
that the Sandinistas were letting cocaine from Colombia move through
Nicaragua. A spokesman for then Senate candidate Oliver North told
The Post that North had been kept aware of Seal's work through
"intelligence sources."
Federal Aviation Administration registration records contained in the
archive confirm that aircraft identified by federal and state
narcotics agents as in the Seal smuggling operation were previously
owned by Air America, Inc., widely reported to have been a C.I.A.
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 that had once belonged to Air America.
According to still other Seal records, at least some of the aircraft
in his smuggling fleet, which included a Lear jet, 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.
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 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
C.I.A.-related secret entity managed by Oliver North and others to
smuggle illegal weapons to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. According to
former D.E.A. agent Celerino Castillo and others, the aircraft was
allegedly involved in a return traffic in cocaine, profits from which
were then used to finance more clandestine gunrunning.
F.A.A. records show that in October 1986, the same Fat Lady was shot
down over Nicaragua with a load of arms destined for the Contras.
Documents found on board the aircraft and seized by the Sandinistas
included logs linking the plane with Area 51 — the nation's
top-secret nuclear-weapons facility at the Nevada Test Site. The
doomed aircraft was co-piloted by Wallace Blaine "Buzz" Sawyer, a
native of western Arkansas, who died in the crash. The admissions of
the surviving crew member, Eugene Hasenfus, began a public unraveling
of the Iran-Contra episode.
An Arkansas gun manufacturer testified in 1993 in federal court in
Fayetteville that the C.I.A. contracted with him to build 250
automatic pistols for the Mena operation. William Holmes testified
that he had been introduced to Seal in Mena by a C.I.A. operative,
and that he then sold weapons to Seal. Even though he was given a
Department of Defense purchase order for guns fitted with silencers,
Holmes testified that he was never paid the $140,000 the government
owed him. "After the Hasenfus plane was shot down," Holmes said, "you
couldn't find a soul around Mena."
Meanwhile, there was still more evidence that Seal's massive
smuggling operation based in Arkansas had been part of a C.I.A.
operation, and that the crimes were continuing well after Seal's
murder. In 1991 sworn testimony to both Congressman Alexander and
Attorney General Bryant, state police investigator Welch recorded
that in 1987 he had documented "new activity at the [Mena] airport
with the appearance of ... an Australian business [a company linked
with the C.I.A.], and C-130s had appeared...."
At the same time, according to Welch, two F.B.I. agents officially
informed him that the C.I.A. "had something going on at the Mena
Airport involving Southern Air Transport [another company linked with
the C.I.A.] ... and they didn't want us [the Arkansas State Police]
to screw it up like we had the last one."
The hundreds of millions in profits generated by the Seal trafficking
via Mena and other outposts resulted in extraordinary banking and
business practices in apparent efforts to launder or disperse the
vast amounts of illicit money in Arkansas and elsewhere. Seal's
financial records show from the early eighties, 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.
According to I.R.S. criminal investigator Duncan, secretaries at the
Mena Airport told him that when Seal flew into Mena, "there would be
stacks of cash to be taken to the bank and laundered." One secretary
told him that she was ordered to obtain numerous cashier's checks,
each in an amount just under $10,000, at various banks in Mena and
surrounding communities, to avoid filing the federal Currency
Transaction Reports required for all bank transactions that exceed
that limit.
Bank tellers testified before a federal grand jury that in November
1982, a Mena airport employee carried a suitcase containing more than
$70,000 into a bank. "The bank officer went down the teller lines
handing out the stacks of $1,000 bills and got the cashier's checks."
Law-enforcement sources confirmed that hundreds of thousands of
dollars were laundered from 1981 to 1983 just in a few small banks
near Mena, and that millions more from Seal's operation were
laundered elsewhere in Arkansas and the nation.
Spanish-language documents in Seal's possession at the time of his
murder also indicate that he had accounts throughout Central America
and was planning to set up his own bank in the Caribbean.
Additionally, Seal's files suggest a grandiose scheme for building an
empire. Papers in his office at the time of his death include
references to dozens of companies, all of which had names that began
with Royale. Among them: Royale Sports, Royale Television Network,
Royale Liquors, Royale Casino, S.A., Royale Pharmaceuticals, Royale
Arabians, Royale Seafood, Royale Security, Royale Resorts ... and on
and on.
Seal was scarcely alone in his extensive smuggling operation based in
Mena from 1981 to 1986, commonly described in both federal and state
law-enforcement files as one of the largest drug-trafficking
operations in the United States at the time, if not in the history of
the drug trade. Documents show Seal confiding on one occasion that he
was "only the transport," pointing to an extensive network of
narcotics distribution and finance in Arkansas and other states.
After drugs were smuggled across the border, the duffel bags of
cocaine would be retrieved by helicopters and dropped onto flatbed
trucks destined for various American cities.
In recognition of Seal's significance in the drug trade, government
prosecutors made him their chief witness in various cases, including
a 1985 Miami trial in absentia of Medellln drug lords; in another
1985 trial of what federal officials regarded as the largest
narcotics-trafficking case to date in Las Vegas; 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 at Mena.
In the end, the Seal documents are vindication for dedicated
officials in Arkansas like agents Duncan and Welch and local
citizens' groups like the Arkansas Committee, whose own evidence and
charges take on new gravity — and also for The Nation, The Village
Voice, the Association of National Security Alumni, the venerable
Washington journalists Sarah McClendon and Jack Anderson, Arkansas
reporters Rodney Bowers and Mara Leveritt, and others who kept an
all-too-authentic story alive amid wider indifference.
But now the larger implications of the newly exposed evidence seem as
disturbing as the criminal enormity it silhouettes. Like his modern
freebooter's life, Seal's documents leave the political and legal
landscape littered with stark questions.
What, for example, 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 repeatedly invoked national security to quash most of the
investigations. Court documents do show clearly that the C.I.A. and
the D.E.A. employed Seal during 1984 and 1985 for the Reagan
administration's celebrated sting attempt to implicate the Nicaraguan
Sandinista regime in cocaine trafficking.
According to a December 1988 Senate Foreign Relations Committee
report, "cases were dropped. The apparent reason was that the
prosecution might have revealed national-security information, even
though all of the crimes which were the focus of the investigation
occurred before Seal became a federal informant."
Tax records show that, having assessed Seal posthumously for some $86
million in back taxes on his earnings from Mena and elsewhere between
1981 and 1983, even the I.R.S. forgave the taxes on hundreds of
millions in known drug and gun profits over the ensuing two-year
period when Seal was officially admitted to be employed by the
government.
To follow the I.R.S. logic, what of the years, crimes, and profits at
Mena in the early eighties, before Barry Seal became an acknowledged
federal operative, as well as the subsequently reported
drug-trafficking activities at Mena even after his murder — crimes
far removed from his admitted cooperation as government informant and
witness?
"Joe [name deleted] works for Seal and cannot be touched because Seal
works for the C.I.A.," a Customs official said in an Arkansas
investigation into drug trafficking during the early eighties. "A
C.I.A. or D.E.A. operation is taking place at the Mena airport," an
F.B.I. telex advised the Arkansas State Police in August 1987, 18
months after Seal's murder. Welch later testified that a Customs
agent told him, "Look, we've been told not to touch anything that has
Barry Seal's name on it, just to let it go."
The London Sunday Telegraph recently reported new evidence, including
a secret code number, that Seal was also working as an operative of
the Defense Intelligence Agency during the period of the gunrunning
and drug smuggling.
Perhaps most telling is what is so visibly missing from the
voluminous files. In thousands of pages reflecting a man of
meticulous organization and planning, Barry Seal seems to have felt
singularly and utterly secure — if not somehow invulnerable — at
least in the ceaseless air transport and delivery into the United
States of tons of cocaine for more than five years. In a 1986 letter
to the D.E.A., the commander and deputy commander of narcotics for
the Louisiana State Police say that Seal "was being given apparent
free rein to import drugs in conjunction with D.E.A. investigations
with so little restraint and control on his actions as to allow him
the opportunity to import drugs for himself should he have been so
disposed."
Seal's personal videotapes, in the authors' possession, show one
scene in which he used U.S. Army paratroop equipment, as well as
militarylike precision, in his drug-transporting operation. Then, in
the middle of the afternoon after a number of dry runs, one of his
airplanes dropped a load of several duffel bags attached to a
parachute. Within seconds, the cargo sitting on the remote grass
landing strip was retrieved by Seal and loaded onto a helicopter that
had followed the low-flying aircraft. "This is the first daylight
cocaine drop in the history of the state of Louisiana," Seal narrates
on the tape. If the duffel bags seen in the smuggler's home movies
were filled with cocaine — as Seal himself states on tape — that
single load would have been worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Perhaps the videos were not of an actual cocaine drop, but merely the
drug trafficker's training video for his smuggling organization, or
even a test maneuver. Regardless, the films show a remarkable,
fearless invincibility. Barry Seal was not expecting apprehension.
His most personal papers show him all but unconcerned about the very
flights and drops that would indeed have been protected or "fixed,"
according to law-enforcement sources, by the collusion of U.S.
intelligence.
In an interview with agent Duncan, Seal brazenly "admitted that he
had been a drug smuggler."
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 shape of government
collaboration in vast drug trafficking and gunrunning, and in a
decade-long cover-up of criminality.
Government investigators apparently had no doubt about the magnitude
of those crimes. According to Customs sources, Seal's operations at
Mena and other bases were involved in the export of guns to Bolivia,
Argentina, Peru, and Brazil, as well as to 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.
Duncan and his colleagues knew that Seal's modus operandi included
dumping most of the drugs in other southern states, so that what
Arkansas agents witnessed in Mena was but a tiny fragment of an
operation staggering in its magnitude. Yet none of the putative
inquiries seems to have made a serious effort to gather even a
fraction of the available Seal documents now assembled and studied by
the authors.
Finally, of course, there are somber questions about then governor
Clinton's own role vis-a-vis the crimes of Mena.
Clinton has acknowledged learning officially about Mena only in April
1988, though a state police investigation had been in progress for
several years. As the state's chief executive, Clinton often claimed
to be fully abreast of such inquiries. In his one public statement on
the matter as governor, in September 1991 he spoke of that
investigation finding "linkages to the federal government," and "all
kinds of questions about whether he [Seal] had any links to the
C.I.A.... and if that backed into the Iran-Contra deal."
But then Clinton did not 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."
As recently as March 1995, Arkansas state trooper Larry Patterson
testified under oath, according to The London Sunday Telegraph, that
he and other officers "discussed repeatedly in Clinton's presence"
the "large quantities of drugs being flown into the Mena airport,
large quantities of money, large quantities of guns," indicating that
Clinton may have known much more about Seal's activities than he has
admitted.
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 freewheeling 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," I.R.S. agents
had concluded by the end of the eighties, documenting a "major
increase" in the amount of large cash and bank transactions in
Arkansas after 1985, despite a struggling local economy.
Meanwhile, prominent backers of Clinton's over the same years —
including bond broker and convicted drug dealer Dan Lasater and
chicken tycoon Don Tyson — have themselves been subjects of extensive
investigative and surveillance files by the D.E.A. or the F.B.I.
similar to those relating to Seal, including allegations of illegal
drug activity that Tyson has recently acknowledged publicly and
denounced as "totally false." "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 are still more proof that for Clinton, the
Arkansas of the eighties 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 1991.
Indeed. But as president of the United States, he need no longer
wonder — and neither should 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 the C.I.A., the D.E.A., the F.B.I.,
the Justice Department, and other relevant agencies of his own
administration — including the long-buried evidence gathered by
I.R.S. agent Duncan and Arkansas state police investigator Welch.
President Clinton should also offer full executive-branch cooperation
with a reopened congressional inquiry, and expose the subject fully
for what it says of both the American past and future.
Seal 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.
The tons of drugs that Seal and his associates brought into the
country, officials agree, affected tens of thousands of lives at the
least, and exacted an incalculable toll on American society. And for
the three presidents, the enduring questions of political scandal are
once again apt: What did they know about Mena? When did they know it?
Why didn't they do anything to stop it?
The crimes of Mena were real. That much is now documented beyond
doubt. The only remaining issues are how far they extended, and who
was responsible.
DJ BLAZE
