-Caveat Lector-
OPERATION PERVERSION DEVIATION [SUCCESSFUL]
FEB. 28, 1993 - JUSTICE HAS BEEN SERVED - FEB. 28, 1999
{{{ REMEMBER WACO }}}
MENA NEWS MEANS TROUBLE FOR SLICK
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 1995 20:48:49 GMT
The Washington Times
Tuesday, January 3, 1995
A TRAIL OF PERSISTENT RUMORS LEADS TO MENA -
Scandal could dwarf
Whitewater
by Hugh Aynesworth
Mena, Ark.--It's a long story with everything: tales of
drug smuggling, bags of cash dropping from the sky, murder
by ambush, revenge in the dead of night, and laced with
the names of famous spies and godfathers, pilots
and presidents.
If only half the particulars are true--and nobody is
sure of the discount rate on the stories--it could be a
scandal to dwarf anything seen before in U.S. politics.
but despite a long run as a staple of congressional
rhetoric, radio talk shows and investigations by most major
news organizations, the accurate particulars remain
elusive. Nevertheless, it's a story that won't go away,
and its locale--the rugged hills deep in the Ouachita
National Forest in the remote mountain counties of what has
become America's most interesting state--and its
connection, if any, to the Whitewater scandals lend the
Mena story the elements and the aura of a bomb ticking
beneath the feed of the famous and the powerful.
Litigation, some of it already in the works, may force
the answers to some questions. One prominent Arkansas
politician, Bill Alexander, who served 12 terms in the U.S.
House of Representatives, where he was the chief deputy
Democratic whip, is working with lawyers for one plaintiff
who accuses Bill Clinton's chief of security with
manipulating evidence.
Mr. Alexander's interest in Mena (which is across the
state from his old congressional district) is not new. He
began hearing about Mena as early as 1988, and as a
congressman he asked the General Accounting Office (GAO) to
investigate how the investigation of foreign drug
trafficking bears on the formulation of U.S. policy.
In a confidential report from the House Appropriations
committee, dated Feb. 22, 1989, the first paragraph of a
six-page, single-spaced report says: "The Reagan
administration repeatedly blocked the efforts by the GAO
to obtain information concerning this investigation."
In 1991, Mr. Alexander obtained a $25,000 grant from
the federal government to be used by the Arkansas State
Police to reopen the investigation. Mr. Alexander got a
commitment from the Arkansas attorney general Winston
Bryant to help. But before the investigation got under
way, Mr. Alexander was upset in the Democratic primary in
1992--the investigation was not an issue in the campaign--
and Bill Clinton was running for president. Few
politicians at home wanted to stir up anything to hurt the
candidacy of their very own good ol' boy.
"There was enough evidence to begin cracking it open,"
says Mr. Alexander, who four years ago pushed hard for
hearings on Mena by House subcommittees on Commerce,
Justice, State and Judiciary, "and suddenly nobody wanted
to touch it. I want to know why.
"The basic problem here is that I (had) the highest
possible clearance that the government can provide for
secrecy. I (was) cleared for secrets that the president
gets--and no one else--but I (was) denied access to
information in a criminal investigation in my state."
The Mena story is fraught with conjecture, much of it
spun by its central figure, a swashbuckling pilot named
Barry Seal, now dead. There is no proof that the
clandestine events are linked to Whitewater, but many of
the figures linked to Mena are figures who have been
closely tied to Bill Clinton and the failure of Madison
Guaranty Savings & Loan Association of Little Rock in 1989,
with its ties to Whitewater Development Corp., the
real-estate partnership of Madison owner James B. McDougal,
Mr. Clinton and their wives.
Mr. Clinton has disclaimed any participation in or
knowledge of any such activity at Mena, the most recent
denial in answer to a question at his Oct. 7 news
conference.
Events at Mena "were primarily a matter for federal
jurisdiction" he said. "The state really had next to
nothing to do with it. The local prosecutor did conduct
an investigation based on what was in the jurisdiction of
state law. The rest of it was under the jurisdiction of
the United States attorneys who were appointed successively
by previous administrations. We had nothing--zero--to do
with it."
The denial was greeted with some skepticism in
Arkansas, where Mr. Clinton's determination to know about
everything going on while he was governor is still remarked
on. Others linked by speculation and circumstance include
Webster L. Hubbell, a close Clinton friend and confidant
who pleaded guilty to bilking Little Rock's Rose Law Firm,
where he was a partner with Hillary Rodham Clinton, and its
clients of $390,000; Dan R. Lasater, a Little Rock
investment banker and longtime contributor to Mr. Clinton's
campaigns, who went to federal prison for distributing
cocaine; and figures in the administrations of President
Reagan and Bush, through their efforts to supply arms to
the Nicaraguan Contras.
The nub of the story is this: That Mena's airport was
the base for a large aviation operation, with planes flying
arms to the Contras in Nicaragua and returning from Central
America with drugs, which were then distributed throughout
the United States. Some of the flights were illegal; all
of them were clandestine.
Though the Mena story has been a staple of gossip and
intrigue for years, it was given new life last year with
the publication of a book called "Compromised: Clinton,
Bush and the CIA," by Terry Reed, a former Air Force
intelligence officer. In it, he asserts that Mr. Clinton
was aware of the scheme to use the planes that took arms
to the Contras to return with drugs, and that through Dan
Lasater he received 10 percent of the hundreds of millions
of dollars in drug profit, which Mr. Lasater laundered.
Mr. Clinton emphatically denies any such activity, and
Mr. Reed has presented no proof. Nevertheless, the Reed
allegations have taken on a life of their own.
TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN
Mr. Reed, who says he was a CIA operative during the
1980s, says the 10 percent of the drug profits were dropped
in the dead of night onto a small ranch outside of Little
Rock in 1984 and 1985--satchels of $100 bills--and
laundered by Dan Lasater either through banks or the
Arkansas Development Finance Authority, a state development
agency that Mr. Clinton, as governor, organized in 1985.
Mr. Reed asserts that Mr. Clinton acquiesced in the
planning and operation of the scheme and compelled state
agencies to help hide evidence.
In this scenario, George Bush, the late William Casey,
Oliver North, two Republican attorneys general, a cadre of
CIA "enforcers" and several Mafia figures were involved in
one way or another, either in the illegal operations or by
assisting, for reasons of national security, in the
cover-up of the scheme.
Mena figures have told investigators they trained
Panamanian pilots at the airport and worked with pilots
employed by the Palestine Liberation Organization. Mr.
Reed says he taught two groups of Nicaraguan pilots how
cont.
to maneuver the weapons drops to Nicaraguan Contras
fighting the Marxist Sandinista government.
One of the lumbering C-123K transport planes, of
the model that was the workhorse of the Vietnam war, was
often seen at Mena in 1984 and 1985, and identified later
as the very plane flown by Eugene Hasenfus when he was
shot down in the Nicaraguan mountains in 1986 delivering
U.S. arms shipments to the Contras.
John Gotti, the New York Mafia boss, is said to have
established a base in this remote area as a safe transit
point for shipments of drugs. The files of investigators
are filled with Swiss bank account numbers and purported
details of how low-level CIA functionaries carried millions
of dollars to deposit to banks in Switzerland.
Some of these assertions were made by figures on both
the right and left who have been discredited. The
descriptions of the Mafia connection came from an Oregon
man who was once charged by federal authorities with
making up a story about witnessing an October 1980 meeting
involving Reagan aides Donald Gregg and Mr. Casey, who he
said had tried to persuade Iranian officials to delay the
release of the Tehran hostages until Mr. Reagan was
inaugurated in 1981. the man was acquitted, but few
believed his story.
SMOKING GUN
But it's Bill Clinton, who held Arkansas in tight
thrall for his 12 years as governor, who is the subject
of most of the speculation. What did he know, when did he
know it--and what did he do about it? Everyone with a
connection to Mr. Clinton and to Mena attracts close
scrutiny, too. Webb Hubbell's fall from power has thrust
him and the firm into the spotlight again. In his book,
Mr. Reed accuses Mr. Hubbell, the former U.S. associate
attorney general who resigned in March, and the Rose Law
Firm of manipulating large sums of money from Mena.
"When the book was first done, three large publishers
refused to publish it unless we took out references to Mr.
Hubbell," Mr. Reed said in a recent interview. "We felt
we couldn't do that."
Perhaps because the embarrassment over Mena would be
bipartisan embarrassment, perhaps because they don't want
to distract attention from a bold agenda, Republican
enthusiasm for looking into the Mena story seems to have
diminished considerably since Nov. 8. But some sort of
congressional inquiry may be inevitable.
"I wouldn't expect Mena to get any congressional
attention until the Whitewater probes have finished," says
one veteran House staffer. "But from what we already know,
I'd bet we'll be able to follow the bouncing ball once
everything starts rolling."
Rep. Dan Burton, Indiana Republican, one of those who
have taken the House floor to argue for an investigation
of Mena, is one of the Republicans who have cooled their
rhetoric since the November elections.
"There obviously were some questionable activities
going on at both the Mena airport and the Whitewater land
development project," Mr. Burton told The Washington Times.
"Presently there are investigations into both of these
matters. It would be premature to comment before the
investigations are completed."
One who probably knows the case far better than anyone
else, Bill Duncan, a former IRS investigator who tried for
years to get an appropriate federal agency to look into
Mena, speculates that nobody will be interested in looking
closely now. "Who's going to investigate it?" he asks.
"For there to be an effective, thorough, productive
investigation of what went terribly wrong in Mena," he
says, "partisan politicians will have to be laid aside,
SEAL AND THE SETUP
Tales about Mena began in the early 1980s when Adler
Barriman "Barry" Seal--who once flew the Boeing 747
passenger jetliner for Trans World Airlines--bought a
hangar at the Rich Intermountain Regional Airport north
of Mena and turned it into a center for modification of
high-performance airplanes.
Nearly everything about the Mena story revolves around
Mr. Seal, a heavyset drug-smuggling pilot with a penchant
for the spectacular--a man whose career often put him in
close proximity with famous people. Some were honest and
legitimate. Some were not.
He was born in Baton Rouge, La., where the politics of
the bizarre is not unknown, and he nourished the perception
that he was a special kind of crook--not exactly a Robin
Hood, because he didn't often give to the poor, but a red-
blooded American who could beat the Columbian bad guys
(and to some extent, the American politicians) at their
own game.
He weaved heroic tales of how he stared down drug lords
in their own dens, how he deftly maneuvered planes below
radar to deliver expensive illicit cargo to primitive
jungle airstrips, how he played one federal agent against
another as they scrambled to catch him.
One former Seal confidant, who served time in prison
for other activities, told a Houston FBI agent several
years ago that Mr. Seal was the ultimate intelligence
gatherer and that alone made him seem "almost magical" to
those who worked with him.
"He had so many connections to federal agencies that
he usually knew what was going down days before it
happened," the one-time pal said. "You think he didn't
play on that kind of information?"
Even though all but his most credulous friends knew
that many of his heroic tales were made up, there always
seemed to be enough truth to blur final evaluation. That
aura, that mystical bearing, is one reason why there are
so many conflicting opinions about Mr. Seal and what went
on at Mena.
Some people think he was merely a journeyman drug
smuggler who talked a good game, who got caught and paid a
debt by helping federal agents grab others. To handle
this assignment Mr. Seal had to have fast airplanes in top
working order. Thus the connection at Mena.
Others think Mr. Seal not only worked for the Drug
Enforcement Administration (the agency concedes that much)
and the CIA (which doesn't concede anything), but hustled
out on his own.
When he first arrived in Mena, Mr. Seal was no more
noticeable than any of the others who congregated for
coffee at the Lime Tree Inn on Mena's main street. He told
good stories, but none had anything to do with drug
smuggling. That was in 1981, four years after he started
making his drug runs.
He told friends later that federal agents had been
getting too close to his Louisiana operations. He needed
a more remote, quieter place.
Mena (population 3,154) was perfect: One of the most
remote locations in North America, yet relatively close to
Central America. The terrain has not changed much since
the land was first settled more than a century ago by
solid, hard-working men and women of Anglo-Saxon stock who
mind their own business and expect others to do the same.
It's just down the road from settlements with plain,
straightforward names: Acorn, Umpire, Ink, Board Camp and
Pine Ridge--the latter the home of the once-famous Jot 'Em
Down Store, where the two fictional country storekeepers
Lum 'n Abner held forth every Sunday night in the '30s and
'40s as one of the top-rated network radio comedy shows
(visitors still seek out the Jot 'Em Down Store.)
He struck up a partnership with Mena businessman Fred
Hampton and quickly staffed the new hangar-headquarters
with trusted mechanics and pilots he had worked with in
earlier operations. Within months he established an outfit
rivaled by few outside the military.
Working mostly at night, when prying eyes from the
other airport operations could not see what they were
doing, Mr. Seal's team rebuilt airplanes, adding state-of-
the-art navigational equipment, extra fuel tanks and door
latches and hatches to make a smuggler's work easier.
Later, after he was arrested in 1984 on
cocaine-distribution charges--and became a valuable "asset"
in the U.S. government sting operations that snared several
international drug merchants--he would claim that over a
span of more than seven years he made more than 100 trips
to South America and brought back more than $5 billion
worth of cocaine.
Much of what has become of "the Mena story" occurred in
the year or so before Mr. Seal was arrested by DEA agents
and the two years during which he was operating stings for
both the DEA and CIA.
During that time, he made what his DEA case agent,
Robert Joura, called "the most important case DEA ever
worked." At risk of brutal death, he infiltrated the
Colombian cocaine cartel and then testified against several
important narcotics kingpins.
Mr. Seal also collected the evidence to prove
Sandinista complicity in Nicaraguan drug running, hiding
cameras aboard his cargo plane to document the loading of
$60 million worth of cocaine (1,452 pounds) by Sandinista
official Federico Vaughan.
But a few months later, in February 1986, Mr. Seal was
slain in a Baton Rouge halfway house at the hands of hired
gunmen dispatched by the Colombian drug cartel.
MYTHS AND THEORIES
There's little doubt that Mr. Seal made many millions
flying the contraband not only into the United States, but
also to other countries. He is thought to have turned a
fortune running guns to Nicaragua--and to Panama.
Nobody has yet pinpointed where the money went. In a
dispatch by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the London Sunday
Telegraph reported recently that more than $1.6 billion in
Seal "earnings" is known to be in an interest-bearing bank
account in the Cayman Islands.
One federal agent who worked the Louisiana cases
against Mr. Seal says that figure "shows just how
ridiculous such 'facts' have become" in the growing Seal
legend.
Mr. Seal testified before Congress that he had made at
least $50 million in his trafficking. The IRS, needing
no further evidence, dunned him for the taxes on that sum.
Rumors persist that diaries kept by Mr. Seal, along
with personal financial papers, have been located and may
become public. Mr. Duncan, the former IRS investigator,
says he has heard this but does not know who controls the
material. He had been told the Seal documents "are
significant and corroborate" some of the current theories.
In a rare interview, Dan Lasater, the Little Rock
investment banker, one-time cocaine distributor and
sometime Clinton fund-raiser, called accusations about him
"unfounded" and says his relationship with Mr. Clinton had
been greatly exaggerated.
"I haven't spoken to Bill Clinton since 1985," he says.
He says he has been in the presence of Mr. Clinton only
eight times in his life.
That worries Mr. Duncan, who with Russell Welch, an
Arkansas State Police investigator, did the early spadework
and built a federal money-laundering case, which he and
others say was sidetracked by higher-ups in Washington.
"My No. 1 concern is that people that could investigate
this are going to be so afraid of being called conspiracy
theorists and kooks themselves that they're not going to
tackle it because of all that," he says.
Earlier this year, Terry Reed and his theories became
the hit of talk radio around the country. Pat Robertson's
television show, "The 700 Club", praised it lavishly. His
book is not a partisan attack on Mr. Clinton, though it
describes him [especially negatively.]
In one account, Mr. Reed and his co-author, John
Cummings, write that Mr. Clinton urged Mr. Reed to accept
a CIA assignment in an even bigger covert enterprise in
Mexico, as the governor smoked a marijuana cigarette in
a minivan parked outside a Little Rock restaurant.
He says Mr. Clinton, "inhaling with expertise," told
him that Oliver North had been "leaning" on him to get a
definite commitment from him. He describes Mr. North,
known to Mr. Reed at the time as "John Cathay", as the
nominal leader of a secret Reagan administration scheme
based in Mena to help arm and finance the Contra efforts.
Another account in his book has Mr. Clinton getting a
dressing down from a CIA official dispatched by Bill Casey,
known as "Frank Johnson", who blamed Mr. Clinton for
skimming too much money from the guns-drugs training scam.
"You're supposed to get 10 percent of the take, not 10
percent of the gross," snapped the CIA man to the chagrined
governor as several participants watched in amazement as
they sat in a munitions bunker at Little Rock Air Force
Base.
Mr. Reed said he later learned that "Frank Johnson"
was, in fact, William P. Barr, then a top Justice
Department official and later attorney general.
"It's ludicrous," Mr. Barr said recently by telephone
from Connecticut. "I've never met Mr. Clinton, never met
Bill Casey, never used an alias and have never been to
Arkansas. And it wasn't until a few months ago that I ever
met Ollie North."
He said he was a lobbyist for the CIA in 1987 but has
done no work for the agency since.
Most others named as participants also deny Mr. Reed's
story.
Mr. North did not return telephone calls, but,
answering a question during his unsuccessful campaign for
the U.S. Senate in Virginia, said he had never met or
spoken with Mr. Reed.
Mr. Reed writes at length about a man named Joe Evans,
a Seal mechanic-partner who he says helped with training
the first of two secret classes of Contra pilots at Nella,
a tiny landing strip just north of Mena. He writes that
Mr. Reed helped organize the training and was the lead
instructor. He and Mr. Evans worked closely, he said.
When the two met on camera during a CNN interview of
Mr. Reed a few weeks ago, Mr. Evans said, "I've never seen
this man before--until he walked through that door."
FACT OR FANTASY
One ranking congressional aide told The Washington
Times in an interview that while Mr. Reed's charges
occasionally seemed absurd, "he's not the only one we
have making such accusations."
"We can no more afford to rule out his allegations
without investigating them than we can to accept everything
he says as gospel."
THE PROBE
Though Mr. Reed's accusations are the most colorfully
detailed, it is the story of two investigators, Messrs.
Duncan and Welch that may in the end accomplish an all-out
investigation. Nobody has questioned their motives or
integrity.
Mr. Duncan first received a tip that money was being
laundered here in April 1983. Mr. Welch was already
working his own sources, collecting evidence on this and
chasing down other reports of unusual happenings--like
sporadic gunfire and unusual air traffic over the mountains
near Mena. Mr. Duncan and Mr. Welch met in July 1983 and
began sharing information.
The evidence seemed persuasive: Fred Hampton and those
who worked for the Seal-Hampton company regularly traded
cash for cashier's checks at banks in Mena, Russellville,
Boonsville and other small towns in western Arkansas.
"Barry just didn't like bank accounts," Mr. Hampton
told The Times recently.
Records of more than $250,000 in such transactions were
subpoenaed. Then the two probers gathered signed
affidavits from several key "traders". The investigators
knew they didn't have a smoking gun, though a couple of
witnesses said they saw heavy weapons and cocaine inside
the Seal cargo planes.
The key, the investigators concluded, was to get
indictments against two or three of the Seal employees,
then persuade them to testify against others.
And though they had proof that $250,000 had been washed
in the cash-for-cashier's checks routine, they figured
there was a lot more money out there somewhere.
Mr. Duncan lobbied the U.S. attorney's office in both
Fort Smith and Little Rock to authorize him to scrutinize
rumored conduits through banks in Little Rock and
elsewhere. The federal prosecutors declined.
THE STONE WALL
The first such indication of what might have happened
had come in February 1983 when Mr. Duncan was asked to
testify before a House Judiciary subcommittee on crime.
Before he left for Washington, his partner telephoned him
to say that a former Mena deputy sheriff might have come
up with the reason why the federal prosecutor, Mr.
Fitzhugh, handled the Fort Smith grand jury session the way
he did.
"Barry Seal claimed he paid a $500,000 bribe to Edwin
Meese (then U.S. attorney general) to stonewall the
investigation," Mr. Welch told Mr. Duncan.
Mr. Duncan says he did not necessarily believe the
Seal claim, but he immediately told IRS lawyer Mary Ann
Cortin in the Disclosure Division that if he was asked, he
would admit to the congressional questioners he had heard
such a claim.
Mr. Duncan says his IRS supervisors instructed him to
dodge the question and told him not to comment on his
"problems" with the U.S. attorney.
"It was not a matter of volunteering information," Mr.
Duncan wrote in a June 20, 1989 affidavit to the IRS, "it
was a matter of truthfully and completely answering to the
best of my ability questions from the subcommittee."
He said that if he were to be asked about the
interagency "problems", he would just say, "I would have
done it differently."
And if asked about the call from Mr. Welch, Mr. Duncan
was told to reply, "I have no information."
Mr. Duncan said he thought such replies would put him
at risk of perjury.
The IRS lawyers said the agency "could not have an
allegation about a bribe to the attorney general attributed
to an IRS agent."
Finally, when Mr. Duncan insisted that he would tell
the truth, the IRS lawyers agreed that he could tell the
committee that he had no other information, beyond Mr.
Welch's phone call.
Finally, a federal grand jury was sworn to hear the
Mena cases in Fort Smith. The investigators thought this
was a hopeful first step: it is not in the nature of a
grand jury to decline to indict when the prosecutor demands
it. Nevertheless, the grand jury declined.
"We found out later that the grand jury heard only
three witnesses and was not shown most of the evidence
we had collected," Mr. Duncan says.
J. Michael Fitzhugh, who had been named U.S. attorney
in Forth Smith in the midst of the investigation, said he
detected no unusual aspects to the case. The grand jury
"just didn't feel they had enough to charge anyone," he
says.
However, one grand juror was so angered that she broke
the rule that grand jurors never discuss their secret
proceedings. The case had been blatantly mishandled, she
later told a congressional investigator, and several grand
jurors thought "there was some type of government
intervention," according to a transcript obtained by the
Wall Street Journal. "Something is being covered up."
With hindsight, Mr. Duncan thinks he should not have
been surprised. "The Mena investigations were never meant
to see the light of day. Investigations were interfered
with and the justice system was subverted." He was never
given the opportunity to explain his case in detail to the
jury.
Mr. Welch has since resigned from the state police and
now works for the Polk County Sheriff's Office in Mena.
Mr. Duncan left the IRS after an internal disagreement and
now works on Medicaid fraud for the state Attorney
General's Office in Little Rock. Both men say they have
been warned that further comment will not help their
career advancement.
END OF SAGA
igation," Mr. Welch told Mr. Duncan.
Mr. Duncan says he did not necessarily believe the
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[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[ APFN --- FOR SOME REASON THE REST OF THIS FILE
IS GARBLED ---]]]]]]]
FOR MORE ON MENA - GO TO APFN MENA
http://esotericworldnews.com/mena.htm
Feb. 28, 1993 - WHAT JUSTICE HAVE WE SEEN WACO - FEB. 28, 1999
http://esotericworldnews.com/whywaco.htm
Have a nice day!
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[CTRL] OPERATION PERVERSION DEVIATION [SUCCESSFUL]
American Patriot Friends Network Sun, 28 Feb 1999 11:18:06 -0500
