The Crimes of Mena
This is the article which had been scheduled to appear in the
Washington Post. After having cleared the legal department for all possible
questions of inaccurate statements, the article was scheduled for
publication when just as the presses were set to roll, Washington Post Managing
Editor Bob Kaiser (Like George Bush, a member of the infamous "Skull
& Bones Fraternity), killed the article without explanation. According
to the sidebar which appeared with the Penthouse Magazine version
of this story, Bob Kaiser refused to even meet with Sally Denton and
Roger Morris, hiding in his office while his secretary made excuses.
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.
THE CRIMES OF MENA
By Sally Denton and Roger Morris
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.l.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.l.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.lA., which describes a number of covert activities around Mena, including
a C.l.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 l.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 l.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
l.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 principle 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 l.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 l.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.l.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.l.A."
In a posthumous jeopardy-assessment case against Seal - also documented
in the archive - the l.R.S. determined that money earned by Seal between
1984 and 1986 was not illegal because of his "C.l.A.-D.E.A. employment."
The only public official acknowledgment of Seal's relationship to the
C.l.A. has been in court and congressional testimony, and in various
published accounts describing the C.l.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.l.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.l.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.l.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.l.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.l.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.l.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.l.A.], and C-130s had appeared...."
At the same time, according to Welch, two F.B.I. agents officially
informed him that the C.l.A. "had something going on at the Mena Airport
involving Southern Air Transport [another company linked with the
C.l.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 l.R.S. criminal investigator Duncan, secretaries at the Mena
Airport told him that when Seal flew into Mena, I'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 companiesQall 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.l.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 l.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 l.R.S. Iogic, 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.l.A.," a Customs official said in an Arkansas
investigation into drug trafficking during the early eighties. "A C.l.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 plan-
ning, 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.l.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.l.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 l.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.
From the July 1995 issue of Penthouse
