"If the people were to ever find out what we have done, we would be chased down the streets and lynched." -- George Bush, cited in the June, 1992 Sarah McClendon Newsletter
"I have put thousands of Americans away for tens of thousands of years for less evidence for conspiracy with less evidence than is available against Ollie North and CIA people. . . . I personally was involved in a deep-cover case that went to the top of the drug world in three countries. The CIA killed it."
Former DEA Agent Michael Levine CNBC-TV, October 8, 1996
"The connections piled up quickly. Contra planes flew north to the U.S., loaded with cocaine, then returned laden with cash. All under the protective umbrella of the United States Government. My informants were perfectly placed: one worked with the Contra pilots at their base, while another moved easily among the Salvadoran military officials who protected the resupply operation. They fed me the names of Contra pilots. Again and again, those names showed up in the DEA database as documented drug traffickers.
"When I pursued the case, my superiors quietly and firmly advised me to move on to other investigations."
Former DEA Agent Celerino Castillo Powder Burns, 1992
"I really take great exception to the fact that 1,000 kilos came in, funded by US taxpayer money."
DEA official Anabelle Grimm, during a 1993 interview on a CBS-TV "60 Minutes" segment entitled "The CIA's Cocaine." The 1991 CIA drug-smuggling event Ms. Grimm described was later found to be much larger. A Florida grand jury and the Wall Street Journal reported it to involve as much as 22 tons.
This area of the website has been assembled in response to the persistent claims of a few individuals (well, just one, really) that Mena is a myth, that the CIA never ran cocaine through the Mena airport, or laundered the proceeds through various Arkansas financial institutions including Morgan Guarantee, Madison S&L, Worthen Bank, and most importantly, the Arkansas Development Finance Authority. That such activities took place at Mena (among other locations) should hardly be surprising, as a read through most newspapers shows that government connections to drug running are not only commonplace, they have become the inevitable symptom of these totally corrupted times.
The hyper-links in this page connect, in most cases, to either published articles or congressional records related to the link subject. They are well worth following and although laborious to read (especially the congressional records), are well worth the effort. It is the hard evidence behind the allegations.
The Intermountain Regional Airport at Mena first came to national attention following the crash of a cargo plane in the jungles of Nicaragua. The sole survivor of the crash, Eugene Hassenfuss, confessed to being part of an illegal operation to arm and resupply the Contra forces staged out of the Mena airport, and the scandal known as Iran-Contra erupted across the headlines of the world.
The specific aircraft which crashed in Nicaragua had, during the Vietnam war, belonged to Air America, the CIA proprietary airline that had flown guns to the Laotian Meo in Long Tien, while bringing heroin back. Following the end of the Vietnam war, the aircraft was purchased by legendary drug smuggler Barry Seal, who renamed it the "Fat Lady" and based it at the Mena airport. Following Seal's murder (an obvious setup by the court system), the plane was used in the gun running operation to Nicaragua, ending with the crash.
The fact that guns were being sent to the Contras was itself illegal, under the Boland Amendment. While diverted arms sales were held aloft as the funding mechanism for the gun running to the Contras, the sheer scale of the Contra effort suggested that another, even more clandestine, funding mechanism had to existed. Drug running. To allay this suspicion, Oliver North claimed that he reported any drug activity to the D.E.A. The D.E.A. says he did no such thing. Evidence of drug running connected to the Contra Resupply was made available to the Iran-Contra Special Prosecutor, but it was not followed up.
After the Iran-Contra scandal erupted, individuals began to come forward with stories that the same planes that ferried guns down to Nicaragua were ferrying back cocaine for sale in the United States. Cocaine whose profits were the real source of funding for the Contra's custom made (and numberless) M-16s. These individuals included military personnel such as Eugene Wheaton, and pilots such as Richard Brenneke, and Terry Reed, who claimed they were part of the guns and drugs operation itself. Some, like Chip Tatum, had documents proving their claims. Others were highly respected law enforcement officers and members of government, such as William Duncan, L.D. Brown, and others, who had stumbled on the drug running operation and tried to expose it. Some of those who had knowledge of Mena started to die.
Almost immediately, it became apparent that Mena enjoyed a special status. Every attempt to investigate met with interference. Investigator Russel Welch of the Arkansas Police was ordered to stay away from drug activity at the Mena Airport. Despite a public statement by then-Governor Bill Clinton that he was doing all he could to investigate allegations of CIA drug running at Mena, citizen's groups charged that funding was cut for any investigations that pointed at Mena, and petitioned the Iran-Contra Special Prosecutor to investigate drug running at Mena. He never did.
Politicians elected on a promise to investigate Mena quickly broke those promises.
Appearing before Congress, Former IRS Criminal Investigator William Duncan testified that he was ordered to suppress information about Mena by his superiors, and that investigations into Mena were shut down on orders from the US Attorney!
Even a Congressman, US Representative Bill Alexander, whoseappeal to Bill Clinton for investigative funding was ignored, charged that he had found interference in the Mena affair from the IRS!
Angered by what appeared to be a cover up, Alexander threatened budget cuts on non-cooperative agencies, then directly challenged Richard Thornburgh,the Attorney General Of The United States, to look into Mena. Thornburgh promised he would investigate. He never did.
The IRS works for the Department of the Treasury. Hence, it was worth noting that following US Representative Bill Alexander's complaints of IRS interference, another division of the Treasury Department, the Customs Bureau, issued the following memo, requesting that all records, especially paper records relating to activities at Mena be sent to Washington D.C.. Included in the memo was the request that Customs be notified if no records were found in the individual offices.
GRIEF AND SHOCK: THAT'S WHAT 40 FAMILIES FELT WHEN THEY WERE TOLD THEIR RELATIVES IN THE MILITARY DIED OF SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS. THEIR PAIN DEEPENED, THOUGH, WHEN THEIR SEARCH FOR ANSWERS HIT A WALL OF SECRECY.-----THE FACTS CONTRADICT DEATH RULINGS ---ON A LATE WINTER EVENING IN MARCH OF 1992, MILITARY POLICEMAN CHAD LANGFORD RADIOED THE SECURITY CENTER AT A SPRAWLING ARMY ARSENAL IN ALABAMA THAT HE WAS STOPPING TO ASSIST A STRANDED MOTORIST. SECONDS LATER, THE RADIO WENT DEAD.
AN MP DISPATCHED TO INVESTIGATE FOUND LANGFORDS PATROL CAR, ITS HAZARD LIGHTS FLASHING AND ITS ENGINE RUNNING, ON A REMOTE GRAVEL ROAD OUTLINED IN PALE MOONLIGHT. NEXT TO THE CAR, THE MP SAID LATER, HE SAW " A LOT OF BLOOD."
ON THE ROAD BENEATH THE CAR'S OPEN FRONT DOOR LAY SPEC. 4 CHAD LANGFORD, DYING IN THE DARK OF A GUN SHOT TO HIS RIGHT TEMPLE.
LANGFORD'S BLOOD-STAINED MP CAP WAS STUFFED IN HIS MOUTH. HIS HANDCUFFS DANGLED FROM HIS LEFT WRIST. THE LANYARD CORD FROM HIS HOLSTER WAS WRAPPED AROUND HIS ANKLES, AND HIS CAR RADIO CABLE WAS KNOTTED AROUND HIS NECK. ---AND LANGFORD'S .45-CALIBER SERVICE PISTOL, WHICH HAD BEEN FIRED TWICE, LAY UNDER HIS LEFT SHOULDER.TWO DAYS LATER-DESPITE THE BIZARRE DEATH SCENE AND BEFORE THE COMPLETION OF LAB TESTS-A MILITARY PATHOLOGIST ISSUED A RULING: ---TWENTY YEAR OLD CHAD LANGFORD HAD COMMITTED SUICIDE
IN TINY ELK CREEK, CALIF., LANGFORD'S FATHER WAS STUNNED BY THE NEWS. JUST 10 DAYS EARLIER, JIM LANGFORD SAID, CHAD HAD TOLD HIM HIS LIFE HAD BEEN THREATENED WHILE HE WAS ON AN UNDERCOVER DRUG INVESTIGATION. MONTHS LATER, LANGFORD'S GRIEF AND SHOCK TURNED TO OUTRAGE. AN ARMY REPORT SAID CHAD STAGED HIS OWN DEATH TO MAKE IT APPEAR THAT HE HAD BEEN MURDERED.
BUT THE REPORT ALSO SAID SOMETHING ELSE: THE ARMY COULD NOT DETERMINE WHETHER CHAD'S FINGERPRINTS WERE ON THE GUN, OR WHETHER HE HAD FIRED A GUN AT ALL. AND UNIDENTIFIED FINGERPRINTS WERE FOUND ON HIS RADIO, MP ARMBAND AND HANDCUFFS.
"I THINK THEY GOT THIS BOY WRAPPED UP IN A DRUG INVESTIGATION THAT GOT HIM KILLED, AND NOW THEY DON'T WANT TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR IT," LANGFORD SAID LAST MONTH, "I THINK THEY'RE COVERING UP SOMETHING BIG TIME.
ACROSS THE NATION, DOZENS OF GRIEVING FAMILIES HAVE ENDURED SIMILAR ORDEALS. LIKE JIM LANGFORD THEY SAY THE MILITARY HAS ERECTED A WALL OF SECRECY AND DECEPTION AROUND THE DEATHS OF SERVICEMEN ON BASES AND SHIPS HERE AND OVERSEAS.
CONTINUED INVESTIGATION OF SENIOR-LEVEL EMPLOYEE MISCONDUCT AND MISMANAGEMENT AT THE INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE, Hearing before the Commerce, Consumer, and Monetary Affairs Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, One Hundred Second Congress, First Session, July 24, 1991,GOV DOC # Y 4.G 74/7:Em 7/16 House probe into why IRS investigator William Duncan faced a career crisis for documenting the money-laundering through Arkansas in the 1980s.
DEPARTMENTS OF COMMERCE, JUSTICE, AND STATE, THE JUDICIARY, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS FOR 1990. Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, One Hundred First Congress, First Session. September 13, 1989. Washington : U.S. G.P.O. GOV DOC. # Y 4.Ap 6/1:C 73/2/990/pt.9 Transcript of Congressman William V. Alexander (D-Arkansas) formally requesting U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh to investigate drug smuggling and gun running at the Intermountain Regional Airport in Mena, Arkansas (while Bush Drug Czar William J. Bennett sits next to him).
DRUGS, LAW ENFORCEMENT AND FOREIGN POLICY, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 1989, S. Prt. 100-165 Chaired by Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the subcommittee heard abundant testimony by drug dealers and pilots about CIA connections to cocaine smuggling. The report concluded that the United States allowed foreign policy objectives to interfere with the War on Drugs.
ENFORCEMENT OF NARCOTICS, FIREARMS, AND MONEY LAUNDERING LAWS, Oversight Hearings before the Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, One Hundredth Congress, Second Session, July 28, September 23, 29, and October5, 1988, GOV DOC # Y 4.J 89/1:100/138 Investigates connections between cocaine smuggler Barry Seal and his role as a "confidential informant" for the Drug Enforcement Administration, including the "sting" operation that attempted to link the Sandinista Government of Nicaragua with the drug trade. Testimony by several high-ranking DEA officials, as well as information from the U.S. Justice Department in the appendixes, linked Lt. Col. Oliver North, the Central Intelligence Agency, and Reagan's National Security Council directly to Seal while he was working out of the Intermountain Regional Airport in Mena, Arkansas as a "confidential informant" for the DEA.
IRS SENIOR EMPLOYEE MISCONDUCT PROBLEMS, Hearings before the Commerce Consumer and Monetary Affairs Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, July 25, 26 and 27, 1989, GOV DOC # Y 4.G 74/7:Em 7/11 Congressional hearings discover that IRS employee problems are due to employees investigating money-laundering of cocaine through Arkansas.
MISCONDUCT BY SENIOR MANAGERS IN THE INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE: TWENTIETH REPORT, by Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, October 4, 1990, GOV DOC # Y 1.1/8:101-800. Report prepared for the Speaker of the House of Representatives containing a section exploring the reasons why IRS investigator William C. Duncan and others were blocked from investigating the money-laundering activities of the international narcotics smuggling organization operated by Adler Berriman `Barry' Seal" in Mena, Arkansas from 1982 to 1986.
SYRIA, PRESIDENT BUSH AND DRUGS, Subcommittee Staff Report, House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice, October 28, 1992 Reports that Bekaa Valley heroin traffickers have close ties to the Syrian government and Army, and that President Bush ignored this problem in his policy towards Syria.
How the CIA laundered millions in drug profits from Mena and paid for Clinton's 1992 election campaign.
by John Dee
* * *
In part one of this article, we examined a CIA-supervised cocaine smuggling operation based during the '80s in Mena, Arkansas. We also detailed evidence of then-Governor Clinton's role in supressing evidnce, mishandling federal funds, even blocking a congressional level investigation into the affair. While Clinton's at-least tacit role in the Mena cover-up continues to this day (he has yet to authorize any investigation into the charges), behind the scenes are highly secretive, quasi-independent elements within the US intelligence community who are handling the actual machinery. In a high level deal between the National Security Council and the Medellin cartel, millions of dollars were paid to Felix Rodriguez, the CIA's commander at El Salvador's Ilopango Air Base, and others (including Manuel Noriega) in exchange for access to the CIA pipeline for Medellin cocaine. In this conclusion, we examine the secret network which laundered the Mena drug money. We also find that these same covert bankers, with close ties to BCCI, financed Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. [It should be noted that since the publication of part one, this writer has learned that Buddy Young was appointed by Pres. Clinton to head the Dallas Regional Office of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Young was Governor Clinton's chief of security, and the man who framed Terry Reed for trying to quit the Mena operation. FEMA, of course, is the agency empowered to sieze control of the country in the event of martial law.]
An independent group of researchers in Arkansas are charging that Governor Bill Clinton is covering up an airport used by the CIA and major cocaine smugglers in a remote corner of the Ozark mountains. According to Deborah Robinson of In These Times, the Inter mountain Regional Airport in Mena,Arkansas continues to be the hub of operations for people like assassinated cocaine kingpin Barry Seal as well as government intelligence operations linked to arms and drug smuggling.
In the 1980's, the Mena airport became one of the world's largest aircraft refurbishing centers, providing services to planes from many countries.Researchers claim that the largest consumers of aircraft refurbishing services are drug smugglers and intelligence agencies involved in covert activities.In fact, residents of Mena, Arkansas, have told reporters that former marine Lt. Colonel Oliver North was a frequent visitor during the 1980's. Eugene Hasenfus, a pilot who was shot down in a Contra supply plane over Nicaragua in 1986, was also seen in town renting cargo vehicles.
A federal Grand Jury looking into activities at the Mena airport refused to hand down any indictments after drug running charges were made public.Deborah Robinson says that Clinton had "ignored the situation" until he began his presidential campaign." Clinton then said he would provide money for a state run investigation of the Mena airport. But according to Robinson, the promise of an investigation was never followed up by Clinton's staff. In fact, a local Arkansas state prosecutor blasted Clinton's promise of an investigation, comparing it to "spitting on a forest fire."
Clinton's involvement in the drug and arms running goes even further than a mere cover-up of the deplorable activities that went on, and are still going on, at the airport in Mena. A federal mail fraud case against an Arkansas pilot-trainer who participated in illegal arms exports to Central Americarelied on a key Clinton staffer as a chief witness. The case was dismissedfor lack of evidence when the CIA refused to allow the discussion of top secret information about the arms transfers.
Terry Reed, a former employee of the CIA's Air America operation in Laos during the Indochina war, claims to have been recruited as a pilot trainer into the Iran operation by Oliver North. In an article written by David Gallis and published last year by Covert Action Information Bulletin, Reed said that in 1983 he had agreed to supply North's operatives with "certain items."
In pursuit of the Reagan administration's Contra war against the Sandinistas, the CIA had planted mines in Nicaragua's harbors. In 1984, Congress passed the Boland Amendment, which cut off US aid to the Contras. According to Reed, it was during this period that North aided him to become involved in a covert operation called "Project Donation". Reed was told he would be reimbursed for supplying the Contras by insurance companies that were linked to North's operation.,
Shortly afterwards, Reed reported the "theft" of Piper turbo-prop aircraft and he filed a $33,000 claim on which he eventually collected almost $7,000.
In late 1985, Reed received a phone call from an Air America buddy, William Cooper, a pilot working with Southern Air Transport, another CIA front company. Cooper also was working with soon to be murdered drug kingpin Barry Seal at the same time he was flying re-supply missions for the Contras. In 1986, he was shot down and killed over Nicaragua along with co-pilot Wallace Sawyer. The plane's cargo-kicker, Eugene Hasenfus, parachuted into the arms of waiting Sandinista soldiers. Video images of his capture spanned the world and forced an airing of a tiny part of US covert operations.
Sandinistas who recovered the downed cargo plane searched Cooper's pockets and found phone numbers linking the re-supply operation with Felix Rodriguez, an associate of George Bush, best known for murdering Che Guevara after his capture in Bolivia. To this day, Rodriguez, who works for the CIA, wears Che's watch as a trophy.
Reed says that Cooper told him that the stolen Piper would soon be returned and that he should store it in a hanger at Mena until the Hasenfus mess blew over. "There was a lot of Contra stuff going on in Arkansas." said Reed, "it was the hub."
Meanwhile, Reed went into business in Mexico with the blessing of Rodriguez, who was overseeing the Contra air re-supply operation in El Salvador. Reed's company used Mexico to export arms to the Contras, in violation of the Boland Amendment. Reed went down to Mexico and his operation continued for a year after the Iran-Contra story broke.
According to Arkansas Committee researcher Mark Swaney, in the summer of 1987, even as the ContraGate hearings were going on in Congress, Terry Reed began to suspect they were using his front company for something other than smuggling weapons. One day, he was looking for a lathe in one of his warehouses near the airport in Guadalajara and he opened up one of the very large air freight shipping containers (they are about 28' long, about 7' high and about 8' wide), and he found it packed full of cocaine.
Swaney reports that Reed realized he was in a very precarious situation because he was the only person on paper who had anything to do with the company set up to run guns to the Contras in Nicaragua out of Mexico and there was nobody to say that he did not know anything about what was going on. Reed decided he wasn't going to play the part of a patsy.
Swaney says that Reed's contact man for the CIA in Mexico was Felix Rodriguez, whom Reed confronted. Reed said that he hadn't bargained for getting into narcotics smuggling and that he was dropping out all together. Soon afterward, his legal problems began.
In a series of mysterious events, Reed was charged with mail fraud for claiming insurance for an aircraft that was used by North's network under Operation Donation. Reed, who was eventually acquitted of the charges, was picked up by the FBI after the missing plane was discovered in the Mena hanger where Reed had put the plane at Cooper's suggestion. The discovery was made by Clinton's security chief Buddy Young. Young testified that his discovery of the stolen plane was coincidental, an assertion federal Judge Frank Thiel said was unsupported by the facts.
Reed was charged with mail fraud for collecting insurance on the plane, but the CIA prevented prosecutors from releasing information they called "top, top secret," about the Rodriguez-North, Southern Air Transport connection. In November 1990, the prosecution admitted they couldn't prosecute Reed without the secret documents and Judge Thiel ordered Reed acquitted on all of the charges.
Allegations of Governor Bill Clinton's extra-marital sexual exploits originated with a 1990 lawsuit by Larry Nichols, a former Arkansas state employee. Nichols was fired by Clinton in 1988 after reporters discovered Nichols had been lobbying on behalf of the Contras from his office as head of the Arkansas Development Finance Authority.
The suit claimed that Clinton had lied when he said Nichols was fired because he was phoning the Contras directly from his state office. Nichols claimed he only called Washington to lobby on behalf of the Contras. In the suit, Nichols also revealed the affair between Clinton and office secretary Gennifer Flowers.
The suit was dropped by Nichols on January 25, 1992, after Gennifer Flowers went public with her story of the affair. Nichols told reporters that he decided to drop the suit after meeting with Clinton security chief Buddy Young- the same man who found Terry Reed's missing Piper aircraft at the Mena airport.
According to Arkansas Committee researcher Mark Swaney, Nichols said that Young had told him he was a "dead man." prompting Nichols to drop the suit. In public, Nichols says he dropped the suit because "the media have made a circus out of this thing and it's gone way too far."
In court documents recently released by Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, it has been revealed that Jackson Stephens, a billionaire banker in Little Rock, Arkansas, and one of presidential candidate Bill Clinton's main supporters, may have played a key role in setting up the illegal purchase by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) of two American banks.
Both First American National Bank, the largest bank in Washington DC, and Georgia National Bank, were purchased by BCCI front man and Stephens business associate Gaith Pharon. Stephens' family bank, the Worthern National Bank,recently extended a two million dollar loan to the Clinton campaign.
Stephens, who is an avid golfer and chairman of the prestigious Masters Tournament Committee, is named in the court records as having brought Pharon together with Stephens' close friend Bert Lance. Lance was a former cabinet official under President Jimmy Carter who was forced to resign due to a banking scandal.
According to newspaper reports, BCCI founder Agha Hasan Abedi was introduced to Lance by Stephens. Stephens, Lance, and First American Bank director and longtime Democratic party power broker Clark Clifford all maintain that they did not know the group of Pakinstani and Saudi investors headed by Pharon, which they were dealing with, were actually fronting for BCCI. Clinton's staff has refused to comment.
Bill Clinton's environmental record has been as dismal as his record in the Iran-Contra scandal. He has supported the incineration of extremely toxic chemicals at a site in the city of Jacksonville, 20 miles from Little Rock, that is reputed to be the most polluted spot in the United States. Jacksonville was the site of Hercules Inc., a company that produced the two components of Agent Orange, 2,4 D, which is still used in agriculture and 2,4,5,T, which was banned by the federal government in 1983 as a carcinogen. Agent Orange was used to defoliate Vietnamese forests during the Indochina war and its production yields the by- product dioxin, the most toxic chemical known on earth.
Hercules sold the operation in 1976 to Vertac Inc., which closed the plant in 1987, leaving behind 20,000 barrels of the chemicals. Gov. Bill Clinton supports a plan to incinerate the waste, a plan that is being vigorously opposed by the residents of Jacksonville.
In These Times reporter Deborah Robinson says that Clinton has allowed Arkansas to become a dumping ground. "Arkansas" she says, "is still kind of a backwoods state and there's a lot of room for someone to set up whatever they want to set up and Arkansas has been exploited by people who have things they want to do that they might no get away with somewhere else." Robinson adds, "there are a lot of questions about what Somebody like Clinton would do for a country when he couldn't do anything for his own state."
The word on Capitol Hill is that Rep. Jim Leach will soon wrap up his inquiry into the spooky goings-on at remote Mena in western Arkansas. For more than a decade, state and federal probes of supposedly government-related drug smuggling, gun running and money laundering at Mena Intermountain Regional Airport have hit a stone wall. But Mr. Leach already can claim some success: He kept the pressure on the Central Intelligence Agency until it completed a still-classified internal probe of the allegations; in a declassifed summary released in November, the CIA for the first time admitted that it had a presence in Arkansas.
The agency was not "associated with money laundering, narcotics trafficking, arms smuggling, or other illegal activities" at Mena, the report concludes. But the CIA did engage in "authorized and lawful activities" at the airfield: a classified "joint-training operation with another federal agency" and contracting for "routine aviation-related services."
At the center of the web of speculation spun around Mena are a few undisputed facts: One of the most successful drug informants in U.S. history, smuggler Barry Seal, based his air operation at Mena. At the height of his career he was importing as much as 1,000 pounds of cocaine per month, and had a personal fortune estimated at more than $50 million. After becoming an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration, he worked at least once with the CIA, in a Sandinista drug sting. He was gunned down by Colombian hit men in Baton Rogue, La., in 1986; eight months later, one of his planes--with an Arkansas pilot at the wheel and Eugene Hasenfus in the cargo bay--was shot down over Nicaragua with a load of Contra supplies.
What had then-Gov. Bill Clinton known about CIA activities at Mena? Asked at an October 1994 press conference, President Clinton said, "They didn't tell me anything about it." Events at Mena, Mr. Clinton continued, "were primarily a matter for federal jurisdiction. 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."
Mr. Clinton was right about federal jurisdiction, but wrong about Arkansas involvement. As reported on this page, local attempts to investigate Mena were tanked twice by the Mr. Clinton's administration in Little Rock, which refused to allocate funds. And in July 1995, a former member of Gov. Clinton's security staff, Arkansas State Trooper L.D. Brown, suddenly stepped forward claiming he had worked with the CIA and Seal running guns to the Contras--and cocaine back to the U.S. Mr. Brown says that when he informed the governor about the drug flights, Mr. Clinton replied, "that's Lasater's deal"--a reference to Little Rock bond daddy Dan Lasater, a Clinton crony later convicted on an apparently unrelated cocaine distribution charge.
The CIA report does not directly address the Lasater allegation. It says trooper Brown applied to the agency but was not offered employment and was not "otherwise associated with CIA." Barry Seal was associated with CIA, but only for "a two-day period" while his plane was being outfitted for the DEA's Sandinista sting. The CIA also says it found no evidence of tampering in earlier money-laundering prosecutions, as several Arkansas investigators have charged.
And what does the CIA say about Mr. Clinotn's knowledge of CIA activities at Mena? It gives its boss wiggle room that parses nicely with his statement that "they didn't tell me anything." In response to Mr. Leach's question about whether information was conveyed to Arkansas officials in the 1980s, the report states that "interface with local officials was handled by the other federal agency" involved in the joint Mena exercise, side-stepping the issue of what Mr. Clinton knew.
The Clinton White House has gone to great lengths to discredit the Mena story. It figures in the notorious White House conspiracy report and was denounced by former Whitewater damage-control counsel Mark Fabiani as "the darkest backwater of right-wing conspiracy theories." Beltway pundits tend to dismiss Mena as an excess of the Clinton critics. But in Arkansas the campaign is more vicious. With a passive press having long ago abandoned the field, Mena investigators such as former Arkansas State Police investigator Russell Welch and former IRS agent Bill Duncan were stripped of their careers after refusing to back away from the case. Mr. Leach's CIA report provides some vindication for the two Arkansans.
0 comments:
Post a Comment