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*
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