The Secret Life of Bill Clinton
Regnery Publishing, Inc.
Washington, D.C.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

IT IS AN UNDISTINGUISHED place, tucked away in the remote Ouachita Mountains of western Arkansas. The architecture is plain, and the food even plainer. But the town of Mena boasts a regional airport with a cluster of first-class retrofitting stations for small and medium-sized aircraft. This is how it became the site of one of the most enduring conspiracy theories of the late twentieth century.

The Mena scandal has been running for ten years now, kept alive by an accretion of new evidence. There is nothing complicated about it. The core allegation is that the airport was used to transport weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras in the early phase of U.S. intervention in Central America.

In late 1983 and early 1984 this may have been perfectly legal, but it crossed into the grey zone once Congress passed the second Boland Amendment restricting the Contra support activities of the CIA and the Defense Department. It is no secret, of course, that the Reagan administration was carrying out a covert operation against Nicaragua in defiance of the will of Congress. But Mena went beyond anything that was revealed by the various noisy investigations into the Iran-Contra affair.

What makes it so fascinating today is evidence that the CIA's base of operations was in Arkansas, and that Governor Bill Clinton was actively involved. The idea that an outwardly liberal and progressive Democrat like Bill Clinton was secretly assisting Oliver North's crusade against the Revolucion Sandinista is so shocking that the American press has dismissed it out of hand. But it is precisely because Mena turns the world upside down that it matters so much. If true, it validates an inchoate suspicion felt by many Americans that things are not what they seem. It suggests that the political rhetoric of the two parties in Washington is mere window dressing, while the real decisions are made in secret collusion without democratic accountability. To examine Mena is to examine the institutional condition of the United States. As for Bill Clinton, it exposes him as a remarkable counterfeit, willing to betray his liberal principles for self-advancement.

It was the political Left that first became exercised about Mena. They were alerted when a Fairchild C-123 military transport was shot down in Nicaragua on October 5, 1986. The plane had been used earlier by cocaine smuggler Berriman Adler Seal, who based his fleet of aircraft at Mena. Arkansas Congressman Bill Alexander, the Democratic Deputy Whip in the House, made it his lonely crusade in the late 1980s to find out whether drug smuggling had somehow become intertwined with rogue operations by the CIA at Mena. The left-wing press, The Nation and The Village Voice, doggedly pursued the story, led by an Irish radical named Alexander Cockburn. He passed the baton to two liberal authors, Roger Morris, author of the Clinton biography Partners in Power, and Sally Denton. They wrote a long expose' called the "Crimes of Mena" for the "Outlook" section of The Washington Post in 1994, only to see it spiked at the last moment.

Until now, no one has provided documentary evidence that Barry Seal's Mena-based air fleet was part of the "Air Contra" supply operation, or that Seal was actually running guns to Nicaragua under the cover of drug smuggling. With due acknowledgment to my colleagues on the Left, I beg to offer the elusive proof.

For Deborah Seal it has been a strange experience to see her late husband transformed into a figure of colossal dimensions, a man who single-handedly defeated Sandinismo in Nicaragua while supplying most of America's cocaine needs in his spare time.

Deborah was a ravishing country girl working the cash register at a little restaurant outside Baton Rouge when she met Barry Seal in 1972. She was twenty. He was a great laughing bear of a man, a 747 pilot who knew the world and offered to take her flying. By then, he was already in trouble. In 1972 he had been caught trying to smuggle plastic explosives to Cuba in a DC-3, and had lost his job with TWA. The smuggling charges against him were eventually thrown out by the judge on technical grounds, an outcome that led congressional investigators to suspect that he was involved in "national security" activities even then. He tried his hand at a variety of small businesses, but by 1977 was smuggling again.

He cut quite a figure in the narco-culture of the Deep South, always back-slapping in his jocular way, always armed with a sack of $50 in quarters to use at public telephones. "I really didn't know what was happening at first," said Debbie Seal. "He'd be traveling, you know, and I was at home with the babies. We had a nice house, but nothing special."

Then it started becoming obvious. He was charged with cocaine trafficking in Honduras. It took him nine months to get out of prison. "Barry had bribed the government to get out, but then there was an election in the middle of it, and he had to pay off a whole new set of officials," she said. In the meantime, he made himself comfortable. "He built himself an air-conditioned house inside the prison with a movie screen and a projector, and the jailer sent these couriers out to fetch his meals from the best restaurants." Debbie would fly down every weekend from New Orleans. The staff would treat her like royalty, throwing her a birthday party, making little gifts. "They liked Barry. He raised the standard of living of everybody in that prison."

At times Barry would make cryptic comments about his work for "the Company" without telling her outright whether he had ever worked for the CIA. He would spin yarns about the Bay of Pigs, and talk of his time in Special Forces, yet his discharge papers list him as an E-2 Private with parachute training in the Louisiana National Guard. "I always had the sense that he was working for the government," his widow says, "but I don't have anything on paper to prove it...and I don't suppose I ever will."

In June 1984 Barry flew his family--on his private Lear jet--to the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Debbie took the children swimming every day while Barry inspected aircraft and schmoozed with the military. He was hobnobbing with some general, which impressed her at the time. She does not remember much about visits to the base, except for seeing a big military cargo plane with a ramp at the back that Barry seemed to be interested in.

By late 1981 Barry Seal had made direct contact with the Colombian cocaine cartels. Over the next three years his fleet of aircraft would become the dominant smuggling conduit for the Medellin Cartel, which reportedly controlled 75 percent of all the cocaine exported from Colombia. The Colombians learned to respect him. They were losing loads of cocaine at a fearful rate as the Reagan administration cranked up its war on drugs in the Caribbean. Seal knew how to get through the defenses. He had never lost a single shipment for the Cartel.

He needed a sophisticated base of operations, far enough inland to evade the stringent patrolling of the coastal states. He chose Mena. "We had gotten so high-tech at that time. Rather than use barnyard mechanics, hiding in the back of hangars...[we needed] a professional shop. That whole airfield is one of the most professional aviation retrofit places in the country, and that's why we went up there," explained Billy Bottoms, a pilot in the organization.

Seal took over a ragged outfit called Rich Mountain Aviation and turned it into a command center with two hangars large enough to hide his aircraft. His fleet had secret fuel "bladders" installed in the floor of the aircraft to extend their flight range. The work was done so professionally that inspectors from the DEA and U.S. Customs invariably failed to detect it. Trap doors were fitted so that he could drop duffel bags of cocaine in mid-flight before landing empty. The police never knew where to look because he did not decide where to make the drop until the last moment, using his state-of-the art gear to give immediate "Loran" coordinates to his helicopter crews.

"I made it a rule to keep my smuggling aircraft out of sight at all times and fly through U.S. airspace only at night," Seal later explained to the President's commission on organized crime. He liked to keep two models of each aircraft. It was a trick that would fool almost everybody who tried to investigate him. He had identical orange-striped Chieftain Navahos with Panther conversions, N7409L and N62856; two Piper Senecas, N80482 and N80492; and most significantly two identical Fairchild C-123 twin engine military transports, restricted aircraft that are officially designated "weapons of war." Sometimes he would fly planes in formation--one aircraft following in the radar shadow of the other--before having them separate for landing. His equipment was the envy of the DEA. "All of his aircraft were equipped with the most expensive cryptic radio communications we have ever seen," said DEA Agent Ernest Jacobsen.

The business was run like a covert operation, each component insulated from the other. The contractors at Rich Mountain Aviation did not fraternize with the pilots, and Barry Seal's other business--money laundering--was done in faraway places: mostly in the Cayman Islands, Panama, and Honduras. Seal's pilots operated under anonymous code numbers. Billy Earle,Jr., for instance, was assigned number 49. His father, Billy Earle, Sr., was number 33. It ensured secrecy. Only Seal himself knew how all the pieces fit together, which is why journalists have found it so difficult to reconstruct.

"I don't believe there's any paramilitary group better equipped than my former associates," Seal told the President's commission. "The narcotics cartel I associated with was as professional as any Fortune 500 company." Revealing some of his tricks--but not the best ones--to an open-jawed gathering of Pentagon top brass and federal officials, he explained that he "used pocket-sized digital encryption devices to send coded telephone messages; I also fitted my smuggling aircraft with Loran-C radar altimeters, beacon interrogating digital radar, communication scramblers..." and on it went. He said that he had made "about one hundred smuggling flights without ever being intercepted by U.S. interdiction authorities. His average load was 300 kilograms, with a top smuggling rate of $5,000 a kilo. On one flight alone he earned a transport fee of $1.5 million. Using wholesale prices, he must have smuggled anywhere from $3 billion to $5 billion worth of drugs into the United States.

Putatively, Barry Seal became a "snitch" for the DEA after he was caught in "Operation Screamer," conspiring to smuggle quaaludes into Florida. Facing the likelihood of a long prison sentence--the federal judge in Florida called him a "heinous criminal"--he made overtures to the Florida office of the DEA. When that failed he went over their heads to Washington. He was helped out by his lawyer, the ubiquitous Richard Ben-Veniste, who later happened to be the chief counsel for the Democrats in the Senate Whitewater investigation. "I did my part by launching him into the arms of Vice President Bush, who embraced him as an undercover operative," Ben-Veniste later told The Wall Street Journal.

The DEA jumped to attention. Instructions came down to the Miami office from DEA headquarters in April 1984 to "work him." Agent Ernest Jacobsen volunteered to take the assignment. He was known for his skill at cracking the hard nuts. "I knew if we could work a deal out, Barry Seal would be one of the best informants DEA ever had," he said. "I mean, every major trafficker in the world was talking to this guy."

Seal immediately offered to help break the Medellin Cartel. He was working on a shipment of 3,000 kilos of cocaine. If he could pull off a sting, it could be the biggest cocaine seizure in history. But it was not easy work. Seal flew to Colombia to meet with the mercurial Carlos Lehder. Lehder had a machine-gun-waving tantrum at the airstrip and forced Seal to take off with too much cargo on a muddy strip. The "Lode Star" Howard 350 crashed. Mr. Lehder's Indian peons salvaged the merchandise. The Lode Star was burned and buried.

Seal survived. The Colombians found him a smaller Cessna Titan 404. It was not equipped to reach the U.S. without stopping, so Lehder told Seal to refuel at a 6,000-foot military landing strip used by the Cartel in Nicaragua, a country that was then governed by the Sandinista Front. Seal did as he was told, arriving on June 3, 1984. But nobody told him there was a flight curfew after 6:00 PM in Nicaragua. His left engine was shot out by Sandinista anti-aircraft fire. The plane made it to the Sandino International Airport in Managua, where Seal suffered his second crash landing in less than a week. He was promptly escorted to a Nicaraguan prison. The Cartel got him out the next morning. For the next three days he found himself a guest of the Colombians at the former mansion of Anastasio Somoza, the fallen dictator. They seemed to have the run of the place. It was there that he managed to snap pictures of the most wanted drug trafficker in the world: Pablo Escobar. "This guy had guts," said Seal's DEA handler. "This guy had more guts than you could know. He took pictures of everything, something I wouldn't have done."

There was consternation in Washington when the pictures arrived. Pablo Escobar in Managua? Hobnobbing with the Sandinistas in Somoza's mansion? If it could be established that the Sandinista security forces were colluding with the Medellin Cartel, it would be a propaganda coup of the first order. Needless to say, it would also be a stick in the eye for the Democrats in Congress, who were mounting a campaign to cut off aid to the Contra rebels.

Meanwhile, Barry Seal still had to fetch Carlos Lehder's ill-fated load of cocaine. Seal told the DEA that he needed a big military transport aircraft. The Cartel were asking him to ferry 18,000 pound loads of coca paste once a week from Peru to three processing labs in Nicaragua, and from there to a 40,000-acre ranch in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. I find this story impossible to believe. There is no reason to process coca paste in Nicaragua. It is far too bulky to transport long distances. The processing phase is carried out in the upper Amazon, close to coca fields in the Ceja De Selva foothills of the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes.

I visited that area with an American colleague in the mid-1980s and reached a cocaine processing settlement along the Rio Apurimac, where we were detained at gunpoint and interrogated. I was able to allay suspicions that we worked for the U.S. DEA by showing a British passport. Before letting us go they laughingly noted that there was nothing to stop them having us drowned in the Apurimac. Two gringos less in the world, who would give a damn? All in jest, mind you. We were loaded onto a motorized canoe loaded with coca. The smugglers nonchalantly picked up a unit of the Peruvian anti-drug police on the way and gave them a ride down to the next settlement. The troops actually sat on the coca sacks. I did not get the impression that the Cartel was suffering serious constraints in Amazonian Peru.

Be that as it may, Barry Seal supposedly convinced the DEA that he needed a Fairchild C-123K ex-military transport to maintain his relationship with the Medellin Cartel. He immediately found one for sale in a magazine called Trader Plane--as we shall see, this was a "cover story." The plane had already been activated by the Defense Department a year earlier. According to the DEA this C-123K, nicknamed the "Fat Lady," was sent off to Rickenbacker Air Force Base in Ohio where a Pentagon team of 20 to 30 men worked round the clock for a week putting in new "vertical fins," long range tanks, and such like. Then the CIA took over. It fitted cameras covering the cargo ramp at the back of the aircraft. The CIA also installed a satellite tracking device.

Seal and two crew flew directly from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida to the Cartel landing strip in Nicaragua. Pablo Escobar was waiting. A team of men identified as members of the Sandinista Interior Ministry were on hand to load the cocaine and fill the 20,000 gallon fuel tank, a bucket at a time, with Soviet aviation fuel. But the CIA's cameras were not working properly. The remote control triggering device strapped on Seal's leg failed, so he had to reach up and start the cameras manually. "The cameras were a joke," said Ernest Jacobsen. "You can hear the motor that is supposed to be silent zinging inside the airplane....Here you've got the Sandinistas with machine guns all around you and you've got a camera going off." It was a close run thing, but Seal managed to cover the noise by switching on some generators. He returned safely on June 25, 1984, with pictures that purported to show that the Medellin Cartel had a protected base of operations in Nicaragua.

The White House was ecstatic. Lt. Col. Oliver North called a meeting at his office in the Old Executive Building. There was a congressional vote on Contra aid coming up. North wanted to go public with the DEA's information. But the DEA was horrified, saying that to go public now would be to risk the biggest sting in the history of U.S. drug enforcement.

Word of Seal's spectacular sting leaked to The Washington Times. Showing great restraint, the newspaper agreed to delay publication for two weeks. Seal set off on the second leg of his kamikaze mission after having loaded the "Fat Lady" with a Cartel "wish list" of Trix breakfast cereal, water skis, bicycles, outboard motors, VCRs, pantyhose, and other goodies that were hard to come by in the arid supermarkets of Nicaragua Libre. He also had $1.5 million in cash to deliver to the Cartel from their American buyers. The DEA told Seal to deliver the money as he normally would. Oliver North, however, suggested that the cash be slipped to the Contras instead, an indication that he was quite willing to use drug profits to fund the Contra movement.

While Seal was en route to Managua, General Paul Gorman, Commander of the U.S. forces in Latin America, told an excited crowd at the San Salvador Chamber of Commerce that he "now had firm proof that the Sandinistas were actively and recently involved in drug trafficking, and the world would soon be given proof." It was a good thing the Colombians weren't reading El Diario de Hoy in San Salvador the next day. By the time the Colombians found out, Seal had escaped. The DEA sting was cut short, but it was already enough to indict Pablo Escobar, Carlos Lehder, and Jorge Ochoa, the leadership roster of the "untouchable" Medellin Cartel.

This then is the "authorized" version of Seal's exploits for the U.S government. In reality it is only half the story. Crucial details have been distorted or fabricated to disguise the second operation that Seal was conducting in utmost secrecy for the White House. What I have discovered is that Seal had a second C-123K. The serial number was 54-674.(The serial number of its sister ship, the "Fat Lady," was 54-679, tail number N441OF.) The second plane first appears in the records of Rich Mountain Aviation on December 26, 1983, long before Seal was contracted to work for the DEA. The first entry is a work order by mechanic Cecil Rice for a propeller. The C-123 was undergoing constant work. In March 1984 Rich Mountain Aviation billed Barry Seal $35,000 for work on the aircraft. In July 1984 the bill was $138,067 for total labor, parts, and gas.

Altogether this C-123 appears 15 times in the service log books of Cecil Rice after December 1983. The second plane flew only at night, and was kept hidden inside a hangar that was strictly off limits to normal employees of the company.

For two years it flew without being registered, a phantom ship with no legal tail number. According to the microfiche records at the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association in Oklahoma City, it first appeared in July 1986 when Corporate Air Service put in a request for a tail number. This was the company that provided the air crews for the Contra resupply operation of Oliver North and General Richard Secord, known as "the Enterprise." It was managed by William Cooper, who was later killed when the "Fat Lady" was shot down by the Sandinistas. Registering the aircraft was a careless slip. The motive, clearly, was to provide the aircraft with proper documentation--and a tail number--so that it could be sold as the Enterprise wound down in late 1986.

The phantom C-123K, nicknamed "No Problema," is now owned by Joe Cadiz, a former operative in Barry Seal's Air Contra. He bought it in 1989 as a souvenir from the Cold War. His name was still etched on the tail, just as he had left it when he was working in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, providing forward maintenance for the Enterprise. The plane was supposed to be destroyed after the "Fat Ladt" was shot down on October 5, 1986, and an American crewman, Eugene Hasenfus was captured. "Once Hasenfus started talking, Oliver North gave the order to get rid of all the airplanes," said Cadiz. "We didn't want to get caught with our pants down. The planes were flown to an airstrip in Honduras, where they were burned up in a ditch. They just bulldozed earth over the top."

But in the mad scramble to leave Tegucigalpa the right engine of "No Problema" caught fire, so it was abandoned at the airport. For several years it sat there on a ramp in the custody of the Honduran Air Force, until Cadiz finally got it back again.

He had a special affection for C-123Ks. He had been a maintenance chief for the Fairchild transports in Vietnam, which was why he was drawn into the Air Contra operation. In the fall of 1983 a CIA contractor called Harry Doan asked him to do some maintenance work on a C-123K that he had bought that August. It was the other C-123, the "Fat Lady" (serial 54-679). The paper trail shows that the "Fat Lady" was brought out of storage by the director of the aerospace museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Colonel Richard L. Uppstrom USAF. He sold it to a Roy L. Stafford on June 17, 1983, who promptly resold it to Harry Doan, of Doan Helicopter on August 18, 1983.

The "Fat Lady" was clearly being activated a year before the DEA sting in Nicaragua. Cadiz recalls that Seal came to view the plane in November 1983, although he says the chronology is hazy a decade later. In January 1984, just after the New Year holiday, Cadiz was invited to a dinner with Seal at Harry Doan's house. "Seal wanted to know everything about the aircraft: how much it would carry, how far it would go....He said it was a clandestine operation and that he was working for the "State Department," but I figured that was just code for the CIA. I'd already heard things on the grapevine. Harry filled me in on the details afterwards."

Over the early months of 1984, Seal came down to test the "Fat Lady" and learn how to fly it. He was pressing Joe Cadiz to join the operation. "He wanted me to 'go down South' as crew chief for the aircraft. I kind of knew what it was about. At first I told him 'No.'" But in mid-1984 Cadiz finally agreed to help, once he was assured that it was a legitimate covert operation. The money was good. He was paid up to $3,00 a week for stints down in Honduras in 1985 teaching the "locals" how to maintain C-123s. By then he had begun to maintain the second aircraft "No Problema," which Seal had been servicing before at Rich Mountain Aviation in Mena.

Cadiz did not like to ask too many questions about the activities of Air Contra. His job was to keep the C-123s in the air. He did not need to know anything else. But along the way he learned that Seal was shipping crates of M-16 rifles from Mena. Cadiz said they were composite weapons drawn from Defense Department stocks with special parts manufactured by a firm called Brodix in Mena. "Harry Doan showed me a couple of these M-16s he had at his house. They had no serial numbers on them, you know, so they couldn't be traced."

It was Cadiz's belief that Seal was "coerced" into bringing cocaine back into the United States in order to generate profits for the Contra operation. "I really think that the government was behind the dope, I really do. They hung Seal out to dry. It wasn't fair what they did to that man."

Seal's two C-123s looked identical from the outside, both painted in black, green, and tan camouflage. Inside they had different radio systems and instrument panels. "No Problema" was the more sophisticated of the two. After the Nicaraguan sting operation, the "Fat Lady" was parked in full view at Mena airport. It did not raise eyebrows because it was now recognized as part of a legitimate DEA operation. The plane stayed there until June 1985, and was rarely flown again. Indeed it was slowly picked to pieces to provide spare parts for "No Problema," which was kept hidden in one of Seal's hangars.

With hindsight, it is clear what Seal was doing. He was using a real DEA operation as a front to obscure an even more sensitive assignment shipping weapons. The cover was masterful. It has caused confusion ever since, sending journalists and investigators on a false trail.

It is frequently asserted that Seal could not have been working for the Contra operation because he was strictly monitored by the DEA in 1984 and 1985. After the Medellin bust Seal worked on two major stings for the DEA, a considerable feat. "Here he is on the front page of The New York Times and all over, and President Reagan has him on TV....It's amazing that the guy could actually buy an aspirin...after that," quipped his handler.

The DEA insists that it had Seal under tight control. To do otherwise would be an admission of negligence since Seal was on bond restrictions. But when pressed in questioning by the House Subcommittee on Crime, Ernest Jacobsen acknowledged that Seal made "a lot of trips" and control was broken for days at a time.

"Were you able to be in touch with Barry when he was off on trips....Did he call in, for example?"

"No, for the simple reason that all the phones down there are tapped....Even when he talked on the phone to me from Louisiana, he would talk in code and talk on pay phones....I think it was probably from being in the dope business as long as he was. But he wouldn't call us. If he did, he would just call and say, 'I'm here, I'll be a couple more days,' and that would be it."

Asked if Seal could have been moonlighting, Jacobsen replied. "I don't think there's much time that I didn't know where Barry Seal was. I'm sure on weekends he could have done what he wanted to...."

Jacobsen concedes that his supervision of Seal was far more relaxed after the Medellin sting. "It was more sporadic, you know. We could talk to him every day, but you know, he was in Louisiana and we were in Miami."

Off the record, the DEA was much more candid. Take this entry from the handwritten diary of Russell Welch, the Arkansas State Trooper trying to investigate the crimes of Mena. "On June 4, 1985, agent Steve Lowrey(DEA) informed me in strictest confidence that it was believed, within his department, that Barry Seal was flying weapons to central and south America in violation of U.S. foreign policy....In return he is allowed to smuggle what he wanted back into the United States."

Clearly, the DEA knew that Seal was not under control. It is also an open question whether Seal's DEA handler, Ernest Jacobsen, was in fact a CIA asset, as suspected by investigators for the Mena probe of the House Banking Committee.

Seal did not live long enough to become a liability to the CIA. A federal judge in Louisiana sentenced him to a halfway house in Baton Rouge on earlier drug charges, even though the Medellin Cartel had put a $1 million contract on his head. He was a sitting duck.

"We were at a Waffle House. That's when I saw them standing there, neat-looking, with Spanish complexions, dressed as salesmen," said Debbie Seal. "They had the trunk up, and Barry was looking at them. They exchanged glances but he didn't show any signs of fear."

The next day, February 19, 1986, two Colombian gunmen opened fire with a Mac-10 machine gun as Seal parked his car in front of the Salvation Army Center where he was confines. They were part of a six man team of Colombians. Three of them were caught, three got away.

After Seal's murder, the IRS seized everything from Debbie Seal. They froze her checking account, and sold the house from under her feet. She fled to Boston with three young children. But the IRS pursued her. She owed $29 million in back taxes from the estate of Barry Seal, they said. She had no money. All she had was a modest annuity from a life insurance policy. The IRS tried to take that away, too. After eight years, an appeals court finally ruled in her favor, accepting that she was an innocent spouse. To this day she believes that the CIA abandoned her family, leaving her to fend off the IRS as best she could rather than admit that Barry was one of theirs.

But life moves on. When the children were old enough, she embarked on a career in nursing. A good, honest profession. Remarriage was out of the question. "I didn't date for eight years; there was no room in my heart for another man," she said. Besides, after Barry Seal the rest were all too boring.

Her husband had already written his own epitaph for inscription on his tombstone. "A rebel adventurer the likes of whom in previous days made America great."